The criticisms about bias just won’t go away. Columbus Day, for instance, was a quiet holiday with relatively few complaints. The problem was that all but one of the readers who called or e-mailed over the long weekend pointed out what they considered to be the newspaper’s slant.
A voice message left the morning of Oct. 9 ridiculed The Courant’s lead picture from the Oct. 8 debate: “Surprise, surprise. Another pro-Kerry picture on the front page. Kerry in the foreground. The president in the background, sitting in a subservient position. … Couldn’t be your anti-Bush bias, could it?”
Another caller said on Oct. 11, “Every time I get The Courant, there’s a big picture of Kerry/Edwards. It seems like you guys are promoting the Democratic Party.”
Another reader, who regularly e-mails, wrote on Oct. 11, “Regarding Sunday’s [Oct. 10] cover. Big, huge Kerry/Edwards banner in the photo with Native Americans and then just below about a quarter of the size [a photo] with tiny Bush letters on a T-shirt. [I] didn’t even get to the articles, just put the paper down and thought of ways to subscribe to USA [Today].”
After a few more complaints, I turned to Tina Bachetti, senior information specialist with The Courant’s Center for News Research and Archives, to check the veracity of readers’ claims that The Courant’s photo editors favor Sen. John Kerry over President George Bush.
The starting point of the survey was the first day of the Democratic National Convention, July 26. The end point was Thursday, the day after the candidates’ final debate. Over the past three months, Kerry’s picture has appeared in the newspaper 41 times, compared with 37 times for Bush. A look at section fronts – including the front page and the covers of the Connecticut, Business, Life and Sports sections – shows that Kerry has appeared on covers 11 times; six of those times in the lead position without an image of equal size of his opponent. Bush has appeared on a section front six times, taking a lead position two of those times. There were four instances when the candidates were given equal play on a section front.
Although a post-convention bounce could be expected, a week-after count for each candidate showed that Bush’s picture appeared in the paper three times compared with Kerry’s four after the GOP convention. After the Democratic convention, Bush’s picture ran four times in a week; Kerry’s seven.
And lest we forget, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s image appeared in The Courant twice after July 26. Neither time was he on the cover of a section.
The numbers are interesting, but a picture count without the context of the accompanying story is superficial. I allowed, however, that the pictures reflected what editors had decided was the campaign story of the day. There were times when the photo choices struck me as strange: A six-column, front-page picture of Kerry over a large headline touting “Bush Builds On Strengths,” for instance, may have been an attempt to balance the presentation with a sidebar (“Campaign Attacks Increasingly Angry”) but it looked like a slight to Bush on the surface. A five-column picture of Kerry accompanying a Business cover story, “A Subtle Lift For Nike; Wristband Tribute To Cyclist Armstrong A Fad,” might have made one wonder who was getting the subtle lift.
Director of Photography John Scanlan said editors generally do take into consideration how many times a candidate’s picture has appeared on the front page.
“As far as Page 1 goes, they are very aware,” Scanlan said. “Everybody [at the news meeting], the designers, everybody, has a rough tally in their head of who was out on the cover previously. We have those kinds of discussions all the time. The kind of discussion we don’t have is whether we had Kerry on the Life cover and Bush on Page 2.
“More important than the numbers is the reason why we’re running the pictures in the paper. … You can’t do it with some formula. Is it Bush’s turn? Is it Kerry’s turn? It’s the news of the day. Is it relevant to the story?”
So, just over two weeks before the election, Kerry has an edge in campaign appearances in The Courant. Does that mean the newspaper has an anti-Bush bias, as some readers accuse? There have been occasions when I’ve perceived a leftward tilt in the coverage. Loaded adjectives occasionally slip into stories and quickly become lightning rods for the newspaper’s critics. As far as the pictures go, the most successful page design usually presents one photo as the dominant image, meaning quality often drives the decision. But any choice has to be balanced with the news of the day. What’s also important, though, is that the newsroom take notice of perceptions.
Scanlan says his staff’s directive is to “be fair, balanced and objective.” Readers tell me it’s the newspaper’s obligation, and they’re watching rabidly.
