Whap! Whap!

Your editors at The Record of Hackensack are on a witch hunt against liberal bias. They’re watching your every word, which might make you nervous, because “liberal bias“ is such a nebulous phrase.

I’m here to help. In several decades as a newspaper editor, I took hundreds of complaints about liberal bias, and in my current job I hunt them down on forums and in letters to the editor. I think I have some tips for you to avoid some common mistakes:

• Mention Barack Obama’s name only in reference to attacks against him. If you must print rebuttals, identify those making the rebuttals with adjectives such as “Muslim,” “left-wing,” “controversial,” or just plain “liberal.”
• Label any story about science, especially those about evolution, fossils, dinosaurs or global warming, as “theory.” Ideally, also use one or more of the adjectives above to describe the theory. This does not include any reference to science made from the pulpit of a conservative church, which should be reported as fact.
• Make no mention of terms such as “recession,” “lagging consumer confidence,” or “layoffs,” unless you explain that they are caused by consumer fears of an Obama presidency.
• Do not run any story identifying someone as gay unless it involves an indictment, incest, child pornography or overdue library books.
• Insert the phrase “where the John McCain-backed surge is working” after every reference to Iraq.
• Limit pictures of blacks to police mug shots.
• Do the same for pictures of Hispanics, but also list their immigration status.

You’ll make the occasional slip-up, like the one I made a few years ago when I ran an AccuWeather forecast for rain on the Fourth of July. I fielded an angry phone call from a woman who had heard a forecast of no rain on a local television station. This was clearly another example of the paper’s liberal bias because we wanted to discourage people from attending patriotic rallies.

Still, if you follow this advice I am confident you can reduce charges of liberal bias by up to 7 percent. There’s nothing you can do about other obvious signs of liberal bias, such as late papers, circulation rate increases, typos, ink that comes off on readers’ fingers, natural disasters …

And please, don’t let any of this crimp your writing style. Bias against gays, blacks, liberals, Muslims, the United Church of Christ and others is still OK.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Politics, Tips and strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.