Behind the Curtain: The effort we make to edit wire bias

The Daily Herald relies on wire services for most of our state, national and international news.

We notice biases, implicit or subtle, in all the sources at one time or another.

Some of you do, too. When I wrote about our Objectivity Council last month, many readers wrote to tell us they see biases in the national/international wire services we use. "Stop using The Washington Post," one reader wrote. "In looking for 'middle of the road' news source, The Post has failed in objectivity, as has the NY Times. Both are liberal in their slant and choice of news items they cover." "I would hope that (the objectivity effort) will include articles by AP reporters as some of them are very biased," another reader wrote. "They treat conservatives very poorly."

We don't use The New York Times service, but we use The Associated Press and Washington Post services, and we have limited access to Bloomberg. For the biggest stories of the day, we'll usually have the choice of a story from both the Post and AP for our print editions, and occasionally Bloomberg.

We must scrutinize those options. There are many things we watch for: adequate detail, clear writing, emphasis on what's most useful to our readers - and certainly, fairness. We could detect bias from either story at any time. Sometimes that will cause us to clearly favor one story over another. Sometimes we'll favor one of the stories for another reason but feel we must edit it. It could be editing a single word, a sentence, a paragraph or whole sections. Sometimes we'll pull from each story to make a combined, single new version.

Not all readers have always agreed with what's finally appeared in the paper regardless of what editing we've done. That's not just in these times of polarizing politics; it has been going on for decades. And we've heard from readers of all political leanings.

The feedback has been helpful. I remember having to start scrutinizing Associated Press stories in 2008 when readers started pointing out that they seemed to favor Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary; it was just a few words at a time that came off as belittling Clinton.

In the recent responses to our objectivity efforts, two readers specifically pointed out wire services' overuse of adjectives. One reader, who said she was not a fan of Donald Trump, told us how an article we ran about him when he was president was "ridiculously nonobjective." "It mentioned his 'lengthy' vacation instead of simply stating the number of days." This is a fantastic point that has occurred to us, too. I will be writing about that in an upcoming column.