A Story of Journalistic Bias
In November 1994 I worked, part time, for a mid-sized metropolitan daily newspaper. You'll recall that 1994 was an election year, and that election saw the Republican Party sweep to big gains nationally in House and Senate races and gubernatorial elections. In the state where I was working, the GOP took the governor's chair held by a retiring Democrat, defeated a three-term Democratic incumbent U.S. Senator with a political novice, and gave the highest statewide vote total in history to that point to another political novice to fill the last two years of the term of another powerful Democrat who had resigned his Senate seat to take a more powerful job.

I was one of four people in the newsroom that night - just four! - who were happy about the election results. The other three dozen or so reporters and editors were very obviously crestfallen, upset, downcast and just plain not happy as CNN reported on GOP victory after another. A cheer did go up when Sen. Ted Kennedy survived a tough challenge (from Mitt Romney, who went on to run the successful Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and then was elected as Massachusetts' governor last year).

The primary political leaning of the newsroom was evident: Democrat. Liberal, anti-Republican. No big deal, that - as long as they kept the bias out of the paper. But the tone for the paper's coverage had already been set in the last weeks of the campaign, when the paper ran the results of a poll in one of the Senate races and spun it as "too close to call" even though the race, involving the three-term incumbent, still had some 18 percent of voters "undecided."

Almost nobody is undecided about a three-term incumbent that close to election day. An honest analysis of the poll would have said that high percentage of "undecided" voters indicated trouble for the incumbent. Instead, the poll was presented in such a way to depress the challengers' supporters and buck up the incumbent's. It didn't work - he lost in a landslide as virtually all of the late undecideds went for the challenger.

The anti-Republican tone also was set when the paper printed a story implying the challenger in that race was racist because he didn't want to hand out pre-sharpened pencils out at a campaign stop in an inner city neighborhood because he might get "stuck." His fear: I might jab myself on a pencil. Their spin: He was suggesting the minority kids might use the pencils as weapons.

The anti-Republican tone was verified at a news staff meeting on election day, before the polls closed but late enough for there to be exit polling data available to the top editors of the paper. One of them, addressing the staff meeting, said this:

"It's worse than we feared."

Not "It's a bigger landslide than was expected."

"It's worse than we feared."

Translation: the evil GOP is winning everything in sight.

(Full disclosure: I was not at that staff meeting. However, I have confirmed that the statement was made with three newsroom staffers who were there. One of them is a Democrat. That's enough to pass the journalistic credibility test.)

A few days later, one of the assistant editorial page editors told me they'd decided to add a local conservative columnist to their staff. It took them until 2001 to get it done - and when they finally got around to it, the paper's editorial page editor discussed with me the possibility of having me write a conservative political column for the paper. I had written more than 150 such columns for two other Nashville papers - a weekly and a start-up free daily - and had the connections and contacts and credibility in conservative circles to write it. But they gave the task to a columnist already on staff who admitted he agreed with Republicans on only a few issues (fiscal conservatism, educational choice, to name two) but still agreed with Democrats 70 percent of the time.

They called the new column "Equal Time," an astonishing admission that the paper had not been giving conservative opinion equal coverage up to that point. But then they ghettoized the conservative opinions in a special once-a-week section, rather than feature them on the main op-ed page.

That's what passes for ideological balance at the editorial pages of Nashville's biggest daily newspaper.