The Denver Post Does a Hit Piece on the Sentinel

by George Gramlich,
News and Commentary
A few weeks ago a reporter from the lefty Denver Post showed up at the Sentinel and wanted to interview me about the “newspaper war” in Happy Valley. He said he was a big-time reporter and had been to Iraq twice, blah, blah, blah. (He looked like a lib. He talked like a lib. He even smelled like a lib. His bio says, “He has focused on environmental and climate issues” and he’s a “licensed lawyer”. Case closed.) Sentinel honcho Fred Hernandez was there, too. I said I didn’t want to get interviewed as the DP is a lib paper and the odds of this reporter and them doing a fair piece on the free speech plethora in Happy Valley were ZERO. We talked to him for about ten minutes, all off the record and showed him the door. I knew what was coming. (Remember the hit piece the Colorado Sun did on us a few months ago.)
And it came last week. A Classic, one sided, lib drivel, moaning about guns, violence, anti-government attitude, etc. The usual progressive hysteria over conservative free speech and the 2nd Amendment. According to the reporter, the libs in town are petrified that we open carry at the Sentinel, and God forbid, walk on Main Street with a scary pistol. (Like many other people do.) Plus, we criticize our local government entities when they do bad things. Mon Dieu!
It was one of the most biased newspaper articles I have ever read. And I read a lot of them.
See the link below to read it, but I pulled out some precious quotes from the article for your amusement: (Note how non-biased the “reporter” is.)
Reporter: “At the right-wing Sentinel, managing editor and president George Gramlich, 73, and his staff work wearing holstered guns as they churn out overtly partisan news…” (Editor/GG: Yup. 9mm handguns give us guidance and helps us write better. AR15’s are mandatory for Editorials. Grenade Launchers for BOCC articles.)
“Longtime Tribune reporter  W.A. Ewing calls the Sentinel “the neo-fascist agit-prop pamphlet up the street” and said it is creating confusion and doubt about government — “softening up the citizenry for authoritarian rule” — and raising risks of violence.” (Editor/GG: Oh, my! I don’t think Ewing likes us rednecks. But you gotta like him, he always stays in character. We like creating “confusion and doubt about government”. That’s a newspaper’s job. Plus, I love when the libs go full lib gibberish progressive jargon, “neo-fascist agitprop”. I thought that might be an agricultural term used here in Happy Valley, but it is not. Might be a complement, though. And, of course, there is the mandatory lib mention of “violence”. They always fail to mention that the vast majority of that comes from them.)
Tribune Editor Hedberg: “The Sentinel draws support from a group of about 50 right-wing extremists…” (Editor/GG: Libs are bad with math. I think we got a few more than 50. So, in the Trib’s and the reporters’s delusional bubble of persecution perception, the Sentinel subscribers are “right-wing extremists”. I guess that is the liberal definition of Christian, conservative Republicans and Unaffiliated citizens who read the Sentinel every week. Which is most of the people in the county. And a huge percentage of the people in the country. Nice way to describe your neighbors who pay the taxes that keeps Custer County going.)
But there was a snippet of sanity at one point in the article. Apparently disagreeing with the hyped-up gun/violence theme the reporter created, the Westcliffe Town Manager, Caleb Patterson noted what most of the county believes, “On balance, Custer County residents benefit from news competition, town manager Caleb Patterson said.” (Editor/GG: Thank you, Caleb. He, and most of the county knows where the negativity and extremism is coming from. And it ain’t the Sentinel.)
So let’s do a little recap on this totally biased story from the reporter and the Denver Post:
Where are all the derogatory and negative comments against the Sentinel coming from in this article? (“right-wing Sentinel”, “partisan news”, “neofascist”, “agitprop”, “right-wing extremists”) From the Tribune people and the reporter. There are no negative comments at all about the Tribune, which, I guess, is the perfect example of mainstream media. That might be surprising to people who live here and know what is going on. Plus, the three non-Trib people interviewed all said having two papers in the county was a good thing. Strange that the people in the county want the Sentinel but somehow the reporter spends the whole article knocking us. This is the mainstream media at its best. And, as you can see, it is a pathetic, transparent joke.
So, go read it and get some belly laughs.
https://www.denverpost.com/2024/07/15/newspaper-feud-westcliff-tribune-sentinel-defamation/
Or try this archive to retrieve the article: https://archive.ph/bTQru
(Addendum: David Codrea’s Second Amendment blog site, one of the biggest in the country, has picked up on this piece of lib propaganda: https://waronguns.com/paper-trail/)