My Billings Gazette

Yesterday, in a post about readers' complaints of bias in newspaper reporting, I asked folks to sound off on two headlines and whether they perceived bias in them.

Only one person played, and that reader said, in essence, "Bring on the bias. I can decide for myself."

Still, I said I would offer my take, and here it is:

HEADLINE NO. 1

"Ford to city: Drop dead," from the New York Daily News in 1979.

This headline, referring to President Gerald Ford's refusal to consider a federal bailout (see -- not entirely a new term) for New York City, is one of the most famous ever written. And it's undeniably biased, turning a political position by Ford into an inflammatory statement.

As Andy Bechtel noted a couple of weeks ago, Ford considered the headline "very unfair" and blamed it for his loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Two things to bear in mind here, however: First, it's a tabloid headline, and the rules are considerably different -- and more liberal -- for those publications than for upmarket broadsheets. Second, while the headline certainly comes from a point of view, it also has that pulling-for-the-hometown-team quality. The same headline wouldn't work in Dubuque. In New York, for the Daily News, it was nearly pitch-perfect.

(By the way, the obituary for the man who wrote the headline is worth reading. Thanks again to Andy for that.)

HEADLINE NO. 2

"Bush rallies GOP faithful" with a secondary headline of "Students soak up spectacle."

This one dates to a couple of years ago, when President George W. Bush visited Billings for a Republican rally at MetraPark. We caught a little bit of grief for the secondary headline (full disclosure: I wrote it), with a few readers saying that the word "spectacle" mocked Bush.

I don't see it. I certainly wasn't thinking it. By any measure, the event that day was a spectacle: Local and statewide politicians shared the stage with the president, firing up voters as an election approached. Faithful Republicans and others wanting to see it crammed into MetraPark for the event. We gave it big coverage, and deservedly so.

Had we written that Bush "made a spectacle of himself," we would have received a well-deserved paddling from readers. But the problem there isn't the word spectacle; it's the supporting words around it.

The reader advocate at the Salt Lake Tribune, Connie Coyne, filed a column this week about the perception of bias in the newspaper's headlines.

I know you'll find this difficult to believe, but we here at The Gazette regularly receive similar complaints from readers -- that we tilt left or right in our coverage.

You may also find this difficult to believe: We take note of such complaints, and our editor, Steve Prosinski, is thorough in following up with those who take the time to register their displeasure. He also follows up with the folks who write the headlines (I'm one of them) when a reader has made a salient point.

A few broad concepts before we proceed:

1. There is not a thinking person alive who doesn't have a point of view, and that includes journalists. The duty is to approach news coverage in a fair, even-handed way, giving the fullest possible story in a manner that is proportionate to the news value and interest level of the topic.

2. Many -- perhaps most -- strident complaints of bias come from a position of bias that is the direct opposite of the complaint. Anyone whose depth of intellectual rigor is consumption of Right-Leaning Pundit A or Left-Leaning Pundit B is likely to spot all instances of bias except his own.

3. Balance is a more complicated concept than simply granting equal time. A story that gives equal time to a NASA scientist and a flat-earther is not balanced.

With exceptions that are so rare as to be statistically insignificant, the people I've worked with in 20-plus years as a professional journalist have been dedicated to facts, not political positions. No single concept gets talked about in newsrooms as much as that one, and the colleagues with whom I've worked have been uniformly focused on that ideal. Does that mean we always attain our ideals? No. Do we occasionally let lazy or loaded language into our stories or headlines? Yes. But in every case I can think of, it has happened because someone rushed or took his or her eye off the ball, not because of some vast conspiracy to push across a certain position.

This brings us to the interactive portion of our post. I'll give you two headlines -- one that's quite famous, and one that appeared in The Gazette a couple of years ago. In the comments section, you tell me whether it's biased and why:

HEADLINE 1: "Ford to city: Drop dead"

HEADLINE 2: "Bush rallies GOP faithful" with a secondary headline of "Students soak up spectacle"

I look forward to your answers. I'll post my take on the two headlines tomorrow.

In a little more than a week, the American Copy Editors Society will launch its annual convention, this one in Minneapolis. For the third consecutive year, for a multitude of reasons, I will be unable to attend.

I'm not alone.

Newspaper copy editing is a small yard, and there's always a lot of talk over the hedges. From what I understand, this great organization will have a turnout well below par. If you consider the times, it's not terribly surprising.

Newspaper companies, you may have heard, are in the midst of the painful vise of general economic gloom and readers' and advertisers' changing habits. That pain has been felt by all sorts of people -- stockholders who have seen the value of their investments plunge, readers who have seen heavy cuts to the offerings in dead-tree editions, newsroom leaders who are forced to do less with less (quick aside: Only the self-delusional say they can do more with less) and, especially, by the thousands of journalists who are now out of work.

I'm not going to get into the massive tangle of factors that brought newspaper companies to where they are today. Instead, I'm going to ask a couple of simple questions and request a thoughtful answer:

In a world of rapid-fire, gotta-have-it-right-now news, how important is detail-oriented copy editing to you? What should be the role of copy editors today?

(On the second question, I rather like the suggestion of my esteemed colleague John McIntyre. Piracy seems to be all the rage.)