On the October 2 broadcast of his Newsradio 850 KOA radio show, Independence Institute president Jon Caldara, commenting on portrayals of him by The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, said, “I have no problem being the target of all the editorial cartoons. It was actually quite an honor for me.” Apparently referring to Colorado Media Matters, Caldara added, “I'm quite honored that there's so many people out there who -- there are groups that actually tape this program to recite it back to find errors. Very flattering. It's no problem.”

Colorado Media Matters has documented the following “errors” by Caldara and his radio and television guests:

• On September 1, Caldara misleadingly claimed that the “majority of money” used to fund public schools goes “into administration,” when, in fact, according to a July 2006 report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), most funding for public schools nationwide and in Colorado goes toward instruction and instruction-related expenses. The report stated that 66.1 percent of expenditures nationwide and 62.3 percent in Colorado for public elementary and secondary education were for what NCES defines as “instruction and instruction-related expenditures” during the 2003-2004 school year.

• Appearing on September 15 as a guest on KBDI Channel 12's Colorado Inside Out, Caldara falsely asserted that the “two major papers ... refuse at this point to make a report of, or talk about, the report we [the Independence Institute] put out chronicling their reporting coverage of Referendum C and D.” The Denver Post, in fact, had published an article about the study.

• On September 11, Caldara characterized as not “fictitious” a debunked scene in the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, during which President Clinton's national security advisor, Sandy Berger, purportedly aborted a fully operational mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Caldara asserted that the scene “is fictitious as far as what was said in dialogue. What wasn't fictitious was they had an opportunity; they didn't take it.”

• On his September 20 show, Caldara allowed right-wing pundit Ann Coulter to claim “we've wrapped up Al Qaeda,” even though the latest U.S. State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism suggests otherwise.

• On the August 25 broadcast of KBDI's Independent Thinking, of which Caldara is the host, he and guest Shayne Madsen, a Colorado election attorney, misled viewers about the origin of a controversial “emergency rule” adopted by Republican Secretary of State Gigi Dennis. Despite Caldara's claim to have “been reading the newspaper reports about this,” neither he nor Madsen explained that the rule change to which they referred reportedly was requested first by lawyers for Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez's campaign, the Colorado Republican Party, and the Republican-backed Trailhead Group, and that Dennis subsequently adopted it “in its entirety.” Rather, Madsen said of the new rule, "[T]his is not the product of just a political appointee or politically elected person." The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News both reported on the partisan sources for the rule change.

From the October 2 broadcast of Newsradio 850 KOA's The Jon Caldara Show, on which he was joined by Amy Oliver Pryzgoda, co-author of the Independence Institute's report on Referendum C and D coverage and a conservative talk-show host on KFKA-AM in Greeley:

CALDARA: Let's go to Golden. [Caller], welcome, you're on Newsradio 850 KOA.

CALLER: Howdy, Jon. Howdy, Amy.

PRYZGODA: Hello.

CALLER: So, Amy, with this precise measuring you did of the column space, what you're saying is you didn't do any measuring of the cartoons which depicted Brother Jon here as a demon intent on taking every Coloradan's lifestyle back to the hunter-gatherer stage?

JON: I tell you, I've --

PRYZGODA: [Caller], are you cynical too?

CALLER: No, I'm [unintelligible] --

JON: The sarcasm alarm has tipped on 850 KOA.

PRYZGODA: Yeah, it must be that 10-to-1 shift, or something. You know what, believe it or not, actually, [caller], I did -- we did measure those. And there is a section in the paper about the editorials, but the most important part of all of this was in the news coverage, where the news coverage stood. One of the important things about the editorial pages -- and, by the way, some of those cartoons that you're talking about actually appeared within the news pages. They always like to say, “Well, no, we only say that on our editorial pages.” Well, that's a crock, because a lot of their editorials appear on the news pages. And those cartoons did as well. What was important about those is, when you see that constant type of bias against those who criticized C and D, that essentially says OK, well here's where they're coming from, now here's where their news coverage is. It just made sense.

CALLER: I don't remember any cartoons of C and D proponents.

CALDARA: No, no.

PRYZGODA: Well, no, not unless they were angelic or something with halos around their head and saving the world.

CALDARA: Well, in fact, I have no problem being the target of all the editorial cartoons. It was actually quite an honor for me. I'm quite honored that there's so many people out there who -- there are groups that actually tape this program to recite it back to find errors. Very flattering. It's no problem.