Yes, I think it’s OK we ran a story on the front page questioning Gov. Sarah Palin’s experience.
Yes, I also think it’s OK we ran a story on the front page a week earlier questioning Sen. Barack Obama’s experience.
Yes, I’m aware our editorial columnists are biased. In fact, we expect them to be.
Those were my answers to readers’ questions over the past several days regarding our presidential election coverage.
Election years are exciting for journalists, and this one seems particularly exciting to voters, many of whom have had a thing or two to say about our coverage.
With two months to go before Nov. 4, here are our goals for covering elections:
• To provide you as much information as possible about the candidates and the issues.
• To provoke your thinking with opinions that reinforce yours and opinions that challenge yours.
• To balance our coverage as much as possible among the ideologies.
For the past two weeks, our afternoon news meetings (which you’re invited to attend) have included conversations about how to play the national party convention story of the day.
Before the first convention launched, we decided to run a front-page story for each of the four days of each convention. Each party also got the main front-page picture for two of those days.
The Democrats got the front-page picture on Tuesday and Friday of their convention week for speeches by Sen. Ted Kennedy and Obama respectively. The Republicans got the bigger treatment on Thursday and Friday for speeches by Palin and Sen. John McCain.
Readers spotted even that difference. On Tuesday, a reader wrote: “Already your pictures of the Democratic Convention on the front page have outdone the Republicans.”
I wrote back explaining that we thought Hurricane Gustav deserved bigger play that day. In fact, Republicans purposely toned down their convention Monday because of the storm. I asked the reader to judge our coverage during the entire run of the convention, which continued for three more nights.
We’ll have to make the same kinds of decisions over the next two months. News events on any given day may be more about one candidate or the other, but overall you should expect us to be balanced.
Chief editorial writer Patrick O’Callahan says his goal is to provide a broad range of perspectives on our opinion pages.
Our roster of domestic-affairs political columnists consists of five conservatives (Charles Krauthammer, George Will, William Kristol, Kathleen Parker and David Brooks) and six liberals (Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, Ellen Goodman, Leonard Pitts and Eugene Robinson). We also run David Broder, whom O’Callahan views as a reporter-analyst who has no obvious partisan or ideological agenda. He was one of the few commentators who panned Obama’s convention speech, for example.
O’Callahan’s review of columns we published from July 1 through early last week found 39 pieces from liberal columnists and 31 pieces from conservative columnists.
“Yes, that’s a lean,” he said. “It wasn’t intentional and may have been influenced by the vacations columnists take in the summer. We’ll be watching ourselves closely during this sensitive political season.”
The bottom line is, we want you to be well-armed with information and ideas by Nov. 4. What you decide is up to you.
LOCAL POLITICAL COVERAGE
In addition to the presidential campaigns, it’s a big year for state and local elections. Our politics editor, Hunter George, is planning coverage of the governor’s race, four congressional seats, 24 seats in the Legislature, six Pierce County posts, more than half a dozen statewide positions and several ballot initiatives. Here’s his plan:
• A 32-page voter guide that poses questions to the above-mentioned candidates and publishes their answers. The online version goes up later this month. The print version will be in the newspaper Oct. 19.
• Coverage of debates among candidates for governor, attorney general, Pierce County executive and the Pierce County Council.
• Campaign finance reports and stories about individuals and organizations seeking to influence your vote.
• A guide to Pierce County’s new ranked-choice voting system.
Karen Peterson: 253-597-8738
