Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves

By CLARK HOYT,
Published: October 18, 2008

LAST Tuesday, The Times ran a Political Memo about the content and style of Sarah Palin’s campaign speeches, and I braced for an outpouring of protest from her supporters.

The article began, “Here is the thing about Gov. Sarah Palin: She loves America. Really loves it.” I thought it sounded sarcastic and condescending, The New York Times making fun of a rube from Alaska, and I was sure others would too.

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Patrick Healy, the reporter, said he intended neither to praise Palin nor to belittle her. After two days on the trail with her, listening to her speeches, her casual remarks to voters and interviewing her advisers, Healy said he was trying to capture the tone and content of her campaign, which stresses patriotism and does not go into policy details.

Throughout this election season, most of the thousands of messages I have received about Times news coverage have alleged bias — bias in headlines, photo selections, word choices, what the newspaper chooses to write about and what it ignores, what it puts on Page 1 and what it puts inside. Most of the complaints, but by no means all of them, have come from the right. Nobody acknowledges the possibility that, because of their own biases, they could be reading more, or less, than was intended into an article, a headline or a picture. Many go a step beyond alleging mere bias to accuse The Times of operating from a conscious agenda to help one candidate and destroy the other.

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Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said, “Our responsibility, as Times journalists, is to set our personal biases aside, approach the news with an open, skeptical mind, and present readers with the information they need to make up their own minds.” He said editors talk a lot about filtering out bias in campaign coverage. Though anger toward The Times is now coming mostly from the Republican camp, Keller said he worried early on that reporters might favor McCain because he had been so accessible, charming them with his bluntness and irreverence. “As the McCain campaign closed off access and took up press-bashing, we had to be on guard for the opposite,” Keller said.

So, why is The Times coming under such relentless fire? Conservatives are sure they know and have anecdotes to support their view. But a lot more feeds into the stream of dissatisfaction, some of it beyond the newspaper’s control. The Times is aggressive this year in assessing the truthfulness of the candidates’ statements and ads, often putting it in an adversarial position with them. The newspaper has run many interpretive articles in the news columns, increasing the opportunities for bias, real or perceived. Finally, the McCain campaign has gone on the attack against The Times and the media since the economy turned sour and his poll numbers began sinking.

Like a lot of news consumers — and at least some Times readers — O’Reilly appears to have a hard time with information that does not fit his view of the world. It is a tough reality every news organization faces.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 19, 2008, on page WK12 of the New York edition.