Student's woes not a big surprise

Called arrogant by some, McSwane also earned praise

Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 27, 2007 at midnight

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J. David McSwane's mother says she told him not to use the F-word.

"Whenever I heard him say it, I told him to knock it off," said Sheila Hansen, of Arvada. "I told him one day you're going to get in a lot of trouble for that, and sure enough this happened."

McSwane, 19, editor of the Colorado State University student newspaper, is in trouble for printing the words "(expletive) Bush" in headline type last week.

Students who have worked with McSwane at the paper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian, said they are not surprised by the furor he has provoked.

They described McSwane as arrogant and eager to make himself the center of attention. Winning a prestigious journalism award shortly after graduating from high school only boosted his ego, the other students said.

"Everything was about him," said Emily Polak, 20, a junior who was a reporter on the CSU paper.

McSwane, a junior, did not return calls seeking comment. His mother said she is surprised that other students find him arrogant.

"I never heard him brag about it," Hansen said of the Peabody Award that he shared for a story that originally ran in 2005 in the Arvada West High School student newspaper.

Using a variety of subterfuges, McSwane documented how an Army recruiter advised him to lie about his academic credentials and his feigned drug use to be accepted into the military.

"I wanted to do something cool, go undercover and do something unusual," McSwane said at the time.

The story made national news. He shared the award with reporters from CBS 4 News who expanded on his story. That triumph won McSwane an internship at the television station, followed by some freelance work at the station, news director Tim Wieland said. Most of the work was research or making phone calls.

Wieland remembers McSwane as "very impressive."

"He very clearly, at a young age, decided he wanted to be a journalist, and for someone his age, (he) is very focused on being a journalist, and very smart," Wieland said.

Those qualities came across differently to some of his colleagues at The Collegian, where he started working during the 2005-06 school year - about the time he was associated with CBS 4 News.

McSwane didn't let anyone forget that he had won the award, said James Baetke, who served in several leadership positions at The Collegian. "To me, Dave has always been a person who looks for attention," said Baetke, 23.

Baetke and McSwane were among students who worked on a series about CSU security. McSwane wanted to add details about their role in uncovering the story, in effect shining the spotlight on themselves, Baetke said.

The other students vetoed the idea, said Baetke, who graduated from CSU last year and is now an intern at a branch of E.W. Scripps, the company that owns the Rocky Mountain News.

Because he had won the award, McSwane seemed to believe that he didn't need to begin by reporting routine news, like others on the Collegian staff, several of the paper's editors said.

"He didn't excel at day-to-day stuff," said Brandon Lowrey, 24, a senior journalism major who was top editor of The Collegian last year. "He gravitated toward the big stuff."

Early on, McSwane did a piece about cocaine dealing in Fort Collins, based on anonymous sources, Lowrey said. Lowrey said he decided to kill the article when McSwane declined to reveal the sources to him.

Also troubling to other students was McSwane's story of growing up in a foster home.

"So he has this heartbreaking story," Lowrey said. But students learned that the foster mother in the home was Hansen, McSwane's natural mother.

"I raised him, and yes, I'm a foster mother," Hansen said. "He was never, ever a foster child."

McSwane attended Faith Christian Academy in Arvada through the eighth grade. He has a tattoo of a cross and U.S. flag on his arm.

"He's very Christian; he's very patriotic," Hansen said. He also has top grades, she said.

McSwane was promoted to city editor of The Collegian last fall, despite the misgivings of some of the other student journalists. In that position, he was abrasive in criticizing reporters - sometimes in front of other staff members - to the point of reducing some of them to tears.

Polak, now a junior, said that happened to her three times.

"He told me I was too emotional, that I wasn't handling stories properly," Polak recalls of incidents last year. "Honestly, this is totally in character," she said of McSwane's present troubles. "I knew something like this would happen."

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