Dear HCN,


Your recent issue on the new Denver airport (HCN, 1/23/95) has caused me to conclude that your standards of journalistic and intellectual honesty are about on the same level as the slickness of your production. Never before have I encountered anything in your paper where you are so wrong (my opinion) and where it is so obvious that you didn't even consider any views opposing yours (which is what really matters). Clearly the airport piece started at the mental destination you had already reached (boondoggle, stupid developers at it again, venal politicians thinking they can make the West something it is not - nice themes on which you have figured out how to base your journal), and then you invented a path to lead there.


I know the piece on the back page was labeled "opinion," and I accept it as such, although it alone would elevate my blood pressure. My only reply to the opinion is to suggest that perhaps living in Paonia has isolated you from the concerns facing those of us who live in the urban West. Gene Amole and John Vanderhoof - a whiny old television personality and a good ol" boy Western Slope legislator - this is the intellectual company you apparently like to keep.


Did it ever occur to you that now that the airport is nearly ready to open that perhaps it is time to stop criticizing - no matter how you felt about this project in the beginning - and begin to offer suggestions that might pull it all together and make it work to its best advantage for the region? Do you think it and the billions of dollars it cost to build should be bull-dozed into oblivion?





John Lebsack


Denver, Colorado