Mike Fancher / Times executive editor
Bias complaints increase in climate of Iraq war, election

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

A reader in Renton wrote, "I have been a subscriber of The Seattle Times for the past eight years and have for the most part felt your coverage of the news was on target. However for the past several months the coverage has continued to be 'in my opinion' slanted more and more to the 'left' with greater coverage of every negative opinion given by a liberal against a conservative. Especially every article that can be found, true or not, that bashes President Bush."

Mike Stanton, executive news editor, responded: "Every day we hear from people who believe we are against the Bush administration, report on a just war unfairly, and undermine the war on terrorism. We also hear from people who believe we have been puppets of the administration, not reporting negatively enough about an unjust war. I even had a couple write the other day to say they were canceling their subscription because they just couldn't stand our conservative bias anymore."

The couple had written that they see conservative bias in story selection and front-page play, as well as coverage of political races. "After 25 years of subscribing to The Seattle Times, we have finally decided to switch to a different paper. We feel that the conservative leaning of The Seattle Times manifests itself in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle ways. ... "

Readers who see bias in the newspaper take no comfort being told that others see it in the opposite direction.

If a reader presumes political motive or intent on our part, he or she will find evidence to support that belief. Evidence to the contrary is typically ignored.

Complaints of bias always increase in election years, and the war in Iraq is adding to the fervor on all sides.

Still, we encourage readers to be timely and specific in citing what they see as slanted coverage. Critical feedback helps us challenge our own assumptions.

With more than half a million Times readers daily and over a million on Sunday, Times editors don't expect to satisfy everyone, and it isn't possible to respond to every complaint, but we'll do our best.

Doonesbury's terrible timing

The Doonesbury strip in today's Times comics includes a character fantasizing serving a man's head to him on a platter. The strip was drawn in April, long before the brutal decapitation of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, but the timing makes the image particularly jarring, even though the strip is unrelated to Iraq.
 
Given the choice, The Times would not have run this particular strip and the syndicate would have recalled it. Unfortunately, by the time we learned about the strip the comics sections were printed and already being shipped to Seattle.

We investigated our options and found that anything short of pulling the entire section of comics was logistically impossible and prohibitively expensive.

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau has said, "I regret the poor timing, and apologize to anyone who was offended by an image that is now clearly inappropriate."

We join in the apology and welcome reader comments to timescomics@seattletimes.com.

Inside the Times appears in the Sunday Seattle Times. If you have a comment on news coverage, write to Michael R. Fancher, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, call 206-464-3310 or send e-mail to mfancher@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists