By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
The town of Bennett is pulling its municipal advertising from two weekly newspapers on the Eastern Plains because board members did not like an article about a sexual assault that allegedly happened in the locker room of a middle school.
The trustees voted May 13 to stop running ads in The I-70 Scout and the Eastern Colorado News, both of which are owned and published by Douglas Claussen. They also discussed whether they could find another newspaper in which to run required public notices.
“I would like for this board not to spend any more money with his (Claussen’s) papers, and if it’s possible, find a different way to post our legal briefings,” Trustee Royce Pindell said during the meeting. “I don’t want to support him and his paper anymore with any ads or anything that we have, and anyone who is putting ads in his paper, I wish they would reconsider it.”
Claussen’s May 7 front-page article in The I-70 Scout included some graphic details from a redacted incident report obtained from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office. In the story, Claussen reported that the suspension of five employees from a Strasburg middle school was the result of a sexual assault of one boy by six other boys after track practice. “Shockingly, the mother of the victim did not want to press charges,” the article also says.
The next week, Claussen published an apology for providing “too many details of the crime” that were “unneeded.” He also wrote that he “should not have used the term ‘shockingly’ in reference to the mother’s decision — that is how I felt, and it crept into the story.”
“For these two issues, I hereby apologize to the family in particular and the public as a whole for my recklessness,” his published letter says.
The board of trustees’ vote happened the evening before Claussen’s apology ran in The I-70 Scout.
Pindell said Claussen’s newspapers “have concerned me for most of the years I’ve lived out here, but this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen him do to anyone. And to victimize a little guy again in his paper is just beyond the pale.” Mayor Whitney Oakley called the article “extremely distasteful” and asked town attorney Scotty Krob if the board had the authority to halt town advertising in The I-70 Scout and the Eastern Colorado News. “I think that the board could direct staff not to expend any advertising dollars with that particular paper until further direction from the board,” Krob responded.
He said the “difficulty” of publishing the town’s public notices elsewhere is that statutes require publication in a newspaper of general circulation in the area. “As near as we can tell so far, The I-70 Scout is the only newspaper of general circulation within the town of Bennett. But if we can find another newspaper, it would certainly be up to the board to decide which newspaper of general circulation” to publish notices in.
The town attorney also told board members they had a “free speech” right to take out a full-page ad in The I-70 Scout condemning the article, as one trustee suggested, if they decided to do that.
But the board did not discuss whether its decision to pull advertising from the newspapers might have First Amendment implications.
In 2022, the Wet Mountain Tribune settled a federal lawsuit that accused Custer County commissioners of violating the newspaper’s First Amendment rights when they revoked its status as the county’s paper of record and instead gave the county’s legal notices contract to a rival newspaper. The lawsuit alleged the commissioners retaliated against the Tribune for publishing “a series of news reports that accurately exposed resume fraud by a county official and otherwise were critical of county government administration.”
It is clearly established law “that government officials cannot while acting under color of state law, retaliate against a person for exercising the constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech,” the lawsuit added.
Under the settlement agreement, Custer County made the Tribune the county’s paper of record for the next four years and paid the newspaper $50,000, according to the Inside the News in Colorado newsletter.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is looking into the Bennett trustees’ vote and its impact on Claussen’s newspapers.
“The right to make editorial decisions about what to cover and how is a fundamental right of news publishers,” said Rachael Johnson, RCFP’s Local Legal Initiative attorney in Colorado, in a statement sent to the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. “Attempts by the government to chill reporting cross a dangerous line.”
During the May 13 Bennett town board meeting, the town manager said Bennett does not have an advertising contract with Claussen’s newspapers. But Claussen showed CFOIC a contract, signed in 2015, that automatically renews “for successive terms of 52 weeks unless either party provides notice of termination at least thirty days prior to the end of the current term.”
Claussen said the town’s display ads, including those for the annual “Bennett Days” festival and other events, bring in $9,000 a year. The town’s legal notices amount to another $1,600 a year for the newspaper.
Losing the revenue “doesn’t put me out of business but it hurts,” he said. “And there are principles here that are bigger than this article.” Among those principles: “We can’t have the government censoring the media. You have to have an independent media in order to have objectivity when it comes to government reporting, and the government needs to leave that ability alone.”
As he wrote in his apology letter, Claussen said he regrets how he worded the May 7 article. “I tripped and fell,” he told CFOIC. “It happens when you’re a small operation.”
He added: “I’ve been covering the town of Bennett for 30 years and the coverage has been overwhelmingly positive.”
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