'Biased coverage’ is in the eye of the beholder

In every presidential election year, a no-win season for newspapers usually begins at the time of the nominating conventions and lasts through Election Day. At The Pilot and its counterparts nationwide, the season is characterized by readers who attack our election coverage as “biased.”

That these denunciations come from both sides of the political divide makes them no less troubling. The highly charged partisan sentiments this year can transform information that editors perceive as neutral into alleged manifestations of partiality.

There are, to be sure, some lamentable lapses in our campaign coverage. Partisans are quick to deplore any misstep as proof that The Pilot is in Barack Obama’s pocket, or that it’s trying to ensure John McCain’s victory.

A number of infuriated readers called Monday morning to criticize the way we publicized that day’s Virginia Beach visit by McCain and Sarah Palin. Most of those callers said Obama had routinely landed on the front page. Why didn’t McCain merit the treatment?

Patricia Hein, of the Outer Banks, was appalled that Monday’s Pilot didn’t put the event on its front page. That omission, she believed, ignored a decorated Navy veteran visiting the community that had once been his home port.

Hein and other angry callers had a point. Despite the best efforts of The Pilot’s newsroom team to provide even-handed treatment of both candidates, our advance coverage of Monday’s McCain-Palin rally deserved higher visibility, particularly on the day of the visit.

Managing Editor Maria Carrillo acknowledges that our failure to highlight the event in Monday’s edition “was a mistake.” It should have run on page 1, Carrillo said. She is quite right.

However, it is instructive to consider how that information landed in relative obscurity at the bottom of page 3 in the front section.

When placement was discussed by newsroom editors Sunday evening, they first checked where the same-day story on Obama’s visit Oct. 2 to Newport News had run. Because it had appeared at the bottom of page 3, that’s where the McCain-Palin information was placed.

The real shortcoming in our announcements of the McCain-Palin visit — one on Oct. 7 and another on Oct. 10 — was their placement as sidebars alongside larger campaign stories. Because of that, the information appeared to be an afterthought, especially in a comparison with three stand-alone stories that announced Obama’s Hampton Roads appearances on Aug. 21 in Chesapeake, Sept. 10 in Norfolk and Oct. 2 in Newport News.

To some degree, campaign coverage is linked to the amount of information available to the press. State Editor Bill Bartel said the Obama press operation is the savviest one he’s seen in his 30 years in political journalism. Bulletins from Obama headquarters arrive daily in newsrooms across America, giving Bartel and all his counterparts details of where Obama and Joe Biden will make appearances that day.

The McCain team takes a more minimalist approach to press contacts. That media strategy, combined with his single Hampton Roads appearance before Monday — compared with three for Obama — has resulted in considerably more local exposure for the Democrat. “We would like to see McCain here more often,” Bartel said.

Editors cannot always anticipate the wildly disparate perceptions readers have about our campaign coverage. For example, a front-page story that preceded McCain’s visit on Oct. 10 compared the scope of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns in Virginia. In it, Pilot writer Julian Walker explained how the once-reliably red state had become an election battleground. One reader pointed to the story as an example of how The Pilot injects pro-Democratic bias into coverage.

The imprecise headline on that story, “McCain, Palin haven’t been seen in state much this year,” hardly counted as a round of applause for McCain. Al Peverall, of Chesapeake, also strenuously objected to the story’s two subheads, which noted that Obama had been in Virginia six times and McCain just once (Virginia Beach marked his second visit). In presenting that information, Peverall said, “The Pilot was making points that go beyond the news,” points designed to hurt McCain and help Obama, he insisted.

It is doubtful that the expansive, page 1 coverage of the McCain visit in Tuesday’s paper — which had more front-page space than our coverage of Obama’s individual appearances — redeemed The Pilot in the eyes of its Republican critics . It did, however, ignite rancor among Obama partisans.

Irwin Levinstein noted that Obama’s visit earlier this month was “buried” in the Hampton Roads section. The enthusiasm for McCain evident in the banner headline and five-column color photo should have been reserved for the opinion pages, Levinstein said. The Pilot, he added, should “not allow the front page to become a broadside for the Republican Party of Virginia.”

Meanwhile, the no-win season ends in less than three weeks.

Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public.editor@pilotonline.com.