The Uneasy Chair

Elsewhere on this page, you’ll see a letter from James Holthaus (“The children are watching”) that provides a near-perfect opportunity to talk about bias...both media bias AND audience bias.

He complains that our Jan. 22 Question of the Week was designed to provoke strong responses.

Guilty as charged.

A milquetoast question yields uninteresting answers.

If you are fascinated to know what random strangers had for dinner or which color socks they like, you wouldn’t be a newspaper reader.

We look for opportunities to find out what people are thinking about their world, so last week we asked: “With the prologue being impeachment, what do you think President Trump’s State of the Union address should be about?”

You might be surprised how often we ask our question of the week of people who either don’t follow the news or don’t have an opinion. Sometimes it takes a dozen tries to find six people who will answer even an innocuous Question of the Week.

Reporters have learned to do this weekly chore at public events where you’re more likely to find alert minds in large numbers and the Jan. 18 Womxn’s March and counter march was the perfect place to find people with opinions.

There are risks of harvesting groupthink.

But our critic falls prey to his own bias about the news when he asserts without evidence that we set out to skew the panel, selecting five anti-Trump and one pro-Trump speaker.

Two reasons there were more of one ilk than the other in that Question of the Week panel:

1. The pro-Trump protesters were outnumbered more than six to one, so our sample was actually representative of the crowd.

2. The reporter specifically sought out the minority voice and might have included a second Trump supporter, but the first person went on for so long that the rest of the pro-Trump marchers had left the scene.

It frustrated the reporter, but that happens sometimes. All that’s needed is a short comment, but some folks take longer to interview than others.

Is our method scientific? No it is not. But I find it hard to believe that any reader expects that feature to be anything other than an opportunity to get more voices in the paper. Given that Jefferson County went 2:1 against Trump, even a truly random sample wouldn’t satisfy Trumpists.

While I’m addressing criticisms, you’ll see the writer also complains that his Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader doesn’t cover news of global and national importance.

Guilty as charged. We have a strong bias against news from outside the county.

We’re a local paper with a news staff of three to cover Jefferson County. Our bias is decidedly local and in 130 years, I don’t think The Leader has ever promised readers anything other than coverage of local news.

I’m glad he wrote a letter to air his opinions, since it gives us the opportunity to tell you what actually happened, as opposed to what Trump supporters are telling one another.

News staff are trained with an old saying about assumptions: “Never assume, lest you make an Ass of U and Me.”

We do our best to represent our corner of the world as it exists and in this case, with all methodological weakness fully disclosed, I’m comfortable saying Question of the Week did its job last week and without any undue insertion of our personal opinions.

(Dean Miller is Editor of The Leader and the former Director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University.)