Opinion in a newspaper
Mwe received on the six-part series criticizing Donald Trump agreed with the editorial board’s assessment of the president or expressed opposition to his policies and style of leadership. That doesn’t mean his supporters stayed silent: More than 160 readers wrote in favor of Trump, most of whom accused The Times of unfairly attacking him.
Among those readers were dozens who accused The Times of bias because its editorial board expressed sharp disagreement with the president. Many of them said newspapers should stick to straight news reporting and not express any opinion at all.
Below is a response to those letters by Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jon Healey.
The news side of The Times is its flagship, but there’s no small amount of opinion scattered around its pages (and its website) — movie reviews, columns, architecture critiques and op-eds all involve clear expressions of opinion. The Times’ editorials may be in a special category because, technically, we on the editorial board are speaking as the voice of the paper, reporting
directly to its publisher. But our group of nine on the editorial board function as a separate newsroom from The Times’ news writers and editors, in our own corner of the building.
The Trump series offers a good illustration of how different our job is from what The Times’ news reporters do, and the efforts we take to keep a wall between our opinions and the rest of the newspaper’s operation.
Like reporters covering the news, we question people and do other forms of research, but we do so independently of them (and they of us). And our task is to do more than just convey the facts (or “alternative facts,” as the case may be). We make judgments, telling you directly when we think someone’s right or wrong, when a policy is good or bad, when a candidate is better than the alternatives or worse.
Those are our opinions, and you’re free to accept or reject them. We also try to make clear what we’re basing those opinions on so you can draw your own informed conclusions.
Now, if being critical of Trump is a problem for you, then the editorial board is guilty as charged. We’ve criticized him and his policies repeatedly since he became a presidential candidate, and this week’s series was our attempt to detail our biggest concerns in one package.
But don’t think that merely expressing an opinion about someone is a sign of bias for or against him.
Being biased means being unfair — making judgments without doing the research and checking the facts, and being unwilling to change those judgments as the facts change. That’s bad journalism, and we do our best not to fall into that trap. We also have a set of principles that help shape those judgments and keep us from contradicting ourselves as times change.
You might view those principles as a bias in favor of civil liberties, equal protection, free trade, competitive markets, environmental protection and an effective social safety net. We plead guilty to that as well.
—