Slusher: Our goal: Not 'liberal,' not 'conservative' -- just stimulating
The call I took this morning from a reader unhappy with one of our editorial cartoons could almost serve as a punctuation mark on the theme for today's column.
The reader - who, I hasten to point out, was reserved and gracious in spite of her clear displeasure - thought the cartoon we published showing Hillary Clinton brandishing a machine gun in the guise of Hollywood bad-guy Edward G. Robinson taunting "the coppers" was in poor taste. Even though "I know you are a Republican paper," she said, we should have shown more respect for someone who may someday be the nation's president and who has done much to elevate the status of women socially, professionally and politically.
I wouldn't quibble with her assessment, and wasn't about to debate her judgment. She's welcome to it, and I'm glad she made it. I'm glad, too, that she was willing to share it with us, though it was obvious that she was more interested in expressing her own viewpoint than in considering ours. But I do bristle at the suggestion that our paper, or even our Opinion page, follows a particular political party line.
It is true that we often describe our editorial philosophy as "socially progressive" and "economically conservative," but within each of those broad labels, there is much room for diversity of opinion and when they intersect, the opportunities for independent conclusions are even greater. We strive for an independent approach to individual issues that considers each on its own merits. And beyond that, we strive for an editorial page that presents every color in the spectrum of reasonable political discourse.
Our regular political columnists include liberal thinkers such as Richard Cohen and Cokie Roberts as well as conservatives such as Byron York and Michael Gerson. In the past week alone, we've run guest columns decrying the potential impact of President Barack Obama's proposed climate-change rules and calling for an expansion of them. We've published political cartoons lampooning Planned Parenthood as "monsters" for the abortion scandal and bemoaning the easy access to guns in America.
Yet, reviewing complaints our customer service forwarded to him this week, Managing Editor Jim Baumann could not escape a contradictory message - on the same day, multiple complaints involving politics were evenly divided between those who said we are "too liberal" and those who said we are "too conservative."
Read what you will into that contradiction. For our part, I'll simply emphasize again that the purpose of our news stories, political or otherwise, is and ought to be to examine issues thoroughly with respect toward and inclusion of all responsible points of view, and the purpose of our Opinion page is and ought to be to engage your intellect both with ideas that expand on your points of view and with ideas that challenge them.
Out of that kind of dialogue come stronger thoughts and better decisions - and, I'm also happy to find, more reserved and gracious disagreements.
Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is assistant managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.