Newspaper and bias
Mark Binker is one of the best political reporters in the state. So I had to laugh when I read this comment from one of our Reader Advisory Network members: Mark Binker is far too conservative. He has given short shrift to the Hagan and Bratton campaigns and to Obama. I was disgusted by the Life on October 21 with full color pictures of the Palin visit. Where were the photos of the huge Obama rally?
Of course, we published photos of the Obama rally, too.
Anyway, I asked the Network this question: Evaluate, in this the last week before the election, the N&R's election coverage in terms of completeness and fairness.
Most of the 102 respondents said they thought the coverage had been fair. That is affirming because our editors and reporters have been tenacious about being evenhanded. We weren't perfect by any means, but over the course of the loooong political season, the coverage should have been straight up.
What surprised me about the answers to my question was the number of people who said that because they had voted early, they had stopped following the campaigning. Here are two:
Just so tired of election coverage -- can't take it anymore, so I probably haven't looked very closely at any election stuff!
I've been hearing far too much for far too long about the election and I just want it to be over with.
The panel is made up of smart, passionate and opinionated readers. Sometimes their thinking converged; sometimes diverged. Normally, I hear from many people who think we and the rest of the media are too liberal. The eye of the beholder is pretty strong on this question.
This is N&R's banner year. The coverage this year is unsurpassed in your history for both completeness and fairness. The reportage and articles have been excellent for all levels of the campaigns..local, state, and national. Give yourselves an "A."
No, my mother didn't write that one...or the following one.
There is nothing fair about N&R's coverage. As with most newspapers there is a very deliberate liberal slant. There is no reporting of the news when it comes to politics and your paper. It has almost become an entirely editorial newspaper.
But maybe we should get that person together with the one below to see if we could weave together some common ground.
You lean toward McCain, and I do not. You hide his and Palin's lies, and tend to play up Obama's. McCain/Palin ticket is a nightmare, who could possibly want them to run our country.
Finally, although some respondents wanted less of the campaign frivolity and more depth on the issues, there is this:
I would like to see more about the clothes, hair, makeup that Sarah Palin has received. She has a bad track record and it is like the media won't touch her. Why is that?
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Comments (1)
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I can't really complain, and I usually do (of liberal bias). I read with an eye to such things, and the local reporting seems very evenhanded. There are a few places I've perceived liberal bias--the treatment of the Godless ad, e.g., where the "wow" factor depends on a secular worldview (which I share in this instance)--but not in a galling way. And I perceived a pro-Repub bias in the treatment of Palin's visit ("Palin stays Positive" was the headline, I think, and that article seemed to me insufficiently critical of--at least in dubious harmony with--her rhetoric). Especially noteworthy given that Killian got kicked; I mark this down to grit-your-teeth professionalism that, if anything, went too far the other way.
Where I have seen liberal bias is in AP stories and the paper's selection/editing of them. The straight AP story--printed in the paper--on Obama's convention speech, e.g., seemed to me very pro-Obama, while the AP "analysis" about which Olbermann fulminated did not appear in the N&R (as I expected). Another example: today's AP story on media bias, reduced to two sentences and hidden inside. Reading a lot of AP feeds in various places (many--but not all--of them, admittedly, right of center, so there's doubtlessly some pressure there), I perceive a slight but persistent liberal bias in how they're culled for the N&R.
Overall, though, the coverage has been pretty exemplary (for a group of leftist zealots).
Posted on November 2, 2008 12:40 AM