Late last week a funny thing happened. The Denver Post, which had twice endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency came out and urged a vote for GOP candidate Cory Gardner in the Colorado Senate Race. This is the journalistic equivalent of the legal doctrine of an admission against interest. It carries more weight than a National Review or Weekly Standard endorsement because it isn't what a regular reader of the Post's editorial pages would expect.

Predictably, it caused some on the political left to freak out. Salon.com's deputy politics editor Luke Brinker (Note: Ostensibly not an opinion columnist, but one of those mythical unbiased editor types.) posted a piece calling the editorial "the most asinine endorsement of 2014" based largely on the fact that Gardner has "hard right" positions like supporting sex-selective abortions and abortions in the 8th month of pregnancy (sorry, that's the incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark "Uterus" Udall) climate change skepticism and "LGBT Equality" (whatever that is).

What most piqued my interest was a comment on the Salon piece by MikeKstar.

"the center-right paper" - except if you ask anyone in Colorado who used to take the Rocky Mountain News, the Post is that "liberal rag not good enough to line my birdcage".

I worked for the Post for many years - still have many friends there.  The consolidation in the newspaper industry and the gobbling up of papers by hedge fund shell corporations (The Post is now owned by private equity firm DigitalFirst Media) means there are fewer true independent voices in media that don't kowtow to business pressures.

The old myth of liberal journalism is a fantasy.  The editorial boards of most major papers are now made up of stuffy, white male, far right-wing conservatives who are told what to do by their corporate masters.

Cory Gardner is an idiot and I weep for the future of our beautiful state if we send him to the Senate.

Here's the problem with everyone who says "liberal journalism is a fantasy."

MikeKStar is the "Typical Newspaper Reporter/Editor." Note that there's plenty of "liberal" to his right. But he's of the opinion that he's within spitting distance of the political center. In a candid moment, he'll probably admit to being left of center, but when he was a reporter, his reportage was straight down the middle. That's Bolshevik Storytelling. His reporting was a little more conservative than his own politics, because he's old enough that journalists still tried (but too often failed) to play the news straight. Outlets like MSNBC and Salon.com don't even try that anymore.