On October 27, callers on the Peter Boyles show on Denver’s KHOW were debating Amendment 43 and Initiative I. After listening to the program, Jones emailed Boyles about his affair with Haggard and indicated that he was ready to go public.

After a few conversations, Boyles says he believed the story and was ready to put Jones on the air. Boyles told us, “After the first couple times I spoke to him I thought, shit, this guy’s not making this up. He had the e-mails, he had the letters — also he had some pretty interesting and compelling information. He had more than just claims. He had two voice mails and a letter and up in the left corner it says, ‘Art.’ Haggard’s middle name is Arthur. He had nothing to win and everything to lose. What else would he do it for?”

The day before Jones was to appear on Boyles’s show, Boyles read excerpts from Jones’s email on the air, and announced that the unnamed author of the email would be a studio guest the following morning.

From her home, Patricia Calhoun listened in disbelief. Mike Jones had told her in mid October that the story was on hold until after the elections. “I immediately called Mike,” she recalls, “because I knew he worked out at five in the morning. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you going on the Boyles show?’ He goes, ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer. The hypocrisy just really got to me, and so yeah, I’m going on the Boyles show.’ “

That same day, Jones called Paula Woodward to share that he had a new piece of evidence that would satisfy KUSA’s burden of proof. It was not the videotape the station had hoped for, but for Woodward it was enough. Woodward says Jones did not mention his decision to discuss the scandal with Boyles the next day.

The evidence Jones gave Woodward was, she says, of a personal nature and never became part of the coverage of the Haggard scandal. But it was good enough. “I got the little bit more that I needed that allowed us to approach Pastor Haggard,” Woodward says. Her decision to keep the evidence secret was sparked in part by concern over the unpredictability of Haggard’s response. “What if he fought like Bill Clinton?” she says. “We didn’t want to get into that.”

On November 1, Mike Jones discussed la affaire Haggard on air using the pseudonym “Paul.” Pastor Ted was not mentioned by name.

Jones’ appearance left KUSA no other choice but to run the story. “We had no intention of going with that story that week until the accuser decided to go on a local radio talk show,” Patti Dennis confirms. “Once he did that and did not name the pastor but said that it was one of the well-known evangelical pastors in Colorado Springs, that narrows it down to about two. We decided that day that we needed to talk to the pastor himself.”

On the evening of November 1, a KUSA film crew was waiting for Ted Haggard when he came home. That night, KUSA ran its first story on the scandal, reporting only that accusations had been made against Ted Haggard.

The next morning, KUSA producers gave copies of the voice mails that Jones claimed were from Haggard, along with the KUSA interview with Haggard from the night before, to voice analysis experts at the University of Colorado-Denver. Colorado law requires that a minimum match of 20 words must be authenticated in order to legally affirm the identity of an individual on an audio recording. When this initial group yielded 9-10 matches, KUSA submitted additional DVDs of Haggard’s sermons. Twenty-four hours later, experts had made 20 matches.

If it was that simple, why didn’t KUSA get these voice mails authenticated back in August? Or September? Or October? “I felt very uncomfortable that we had somewhat limited circumstantial evidence,” says Dennis. “And I thought since these people apparently met once a month when we met with him in late August we thought within about a month there would be another meeting. When there wasn’t, the accuser got frustrated and decided to go talk to a radio talk show host. Those were his words, not ours. So you know it didn’t occur to us at the time that matching those words was going to be the most effective way.”

Hindsight is hindsight, of course, but verifying those tapes seems a no-brainer. Still, here we have a case of a news outlet trying to do the right thing, trying to be responsible — and it loses out because of that caution.

For her part, Patti Dennis says she has no regrets. “I don’t regret our sensitivity and our process to verify. We believed, based on the three-year relationship between the two, there would likely be another meeting in September or October. When that didn’t happen, the accuser decided to break his own silence. In hindsight, the only move we could have made was to verify the voice mail match with the pastor’s voice, but I don’t think that would have been enough for me to go with the story.”

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