{"id":31798,"date":"2023-09-12T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-13T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/protesters-picket-the-durango-herald\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T01:46:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:46:27","slug":"protesters-picket-the-durango-herald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/protesters-picket-the-durango-herald\/","title":{"rendered":"Protesters picket The Durango Herald"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"About
About 20 protesters, including leaders of the La Plata County Republican Central Committee, stand out front of The Durango Herald on Tuesday voicing their concerns over what appears in The Herald\u2019s pages. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald)<\/span>Jerry McBride<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Approximately 20 protesters, including leaders of the La Plata County Republican Central Committee, convened outside The Durango Herald <\/em>office Tuesday morning holding signs asking passersby to \u201cboycott biased Herald.\u201d<\/p>\n

Party chairwoman Shelli Shaw, past chairman Dave Peters and secretary Hope Scheppelman were all present. Signs held by attendees called out <\/em>staff of The Herald<\/em> by name.<\/p>\n

\u201cPut the information out there and let people decide for themselves,\u201d Shaw said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t need to be censored or decided by The Durango Herald<\/em> or any other media outlet. It needs to be presented and let people have the ability to think for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attendees called past reporting \u201cbiased\u201d and said that letters to the editor submitted by conservative voices are not always published.<\/p>\n

Opinion Editor Ann Marie Swan was not available for comment before deadline, but a recent editorial calling<\/a> for letter submissions said that some letters \u201cwon\u2019t see the light of day in our pages because they\u2019re inappropriate or don\u2019t meet basic criteria,\u201d and highlighted that \u201cthe most common reason being letter writers\u2019 opinions must be based in fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

The GOP executive committee also delivered a letter to The Herald<\/em> stating that its members would only communicate with the newspaper \u201cvia digital means.\u201d The letter also said The Herald\u2019s<\/em> journalists were no longer welcome at the party\u2019s events, including the upcoming Lincoln Day Dinner.<\/p>\n

A recent news story on an event hosted by<\/a> the party with Moms For Liberty representative Darcy Schoening was the immediate impetus for the protest. Attendees said the number of protesters and attendees documented in the article were inaccurate.<\/p>\n

Shaw also called out an editorial error made in the photo captions, which has now been corrected, in which a numeral was left off the title of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4031.<\/p>\n

\"About
About 20 protesters, including leaders of the La Plata County Republican Central Committee, stand out front of The Durango Herald on Tuesday voicing their concerns over what appears in The Herald\u2019s pages. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald)<\/span>Jerry McBride<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Most protesters, including Peters, declined to comment on-record regarding their reasons for being at the protest. Peters explained that the party was investigating a potential lawsuit against the paper.<\/p>\n

Several attendees\u2019 signs implied that The Herald<\/em> has infringed upon the rights enshrined in the First Amendment \u2014 the U.S. Constitution forbids the government from limiting free speech, but makes no mention of private businesses or media doing so.<\/p>\n

\"Former
Former Party Chairman Dave Peters, center, said the party was looking at pursing a lawsuit against The Durango Herald at a protest outside the building Tuesday. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald)<\/span>Jerry McBride<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cIf there\u2019s any kind of political agenda that\u2019s preventing us from voicing ourselves, it goes against the First Amendment,\u201d said Amor Bonner, who had not planned to attend the protest but was given a sign as she passed by. \u201cWe as American people, we\u2019ve been given the liberty from the beginning to be ourselves and to be a free nation, and to share what we believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

For most protesters, such as Diane Pauls, the mission of the event was to highlight that conservative voices feel their opinions are not being treated fairly.<\/p>\n

\u201cAwareness and equal treatment\u201d was the goal, Pauls said.<\/p>\n

rschafir@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leaders from La Plata County GOP showed up to protest coverage, bar reporters entry from events<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,3151,3152,728,265,1304],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-31798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-media","tag-news-media","tag-political-systems","tag-politics","tag-republican-party"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81569,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31798\/revisions\/81569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31798"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=31798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}