Lean to the left, lean to the right

In a letter to the editor from a forward operating base in Afghanistan, Spc. Thomas McCormick took us to task this week for what he sees as a right-wing bias in our opinion pages.

He suggested that in our zeal to serve the "U.S. military community, wherever they fight and wherever they live’’ we had wrongfully assumed that the community was “Republican, Sarah Palin-loving, Barack Obama-hating and Democrat-bashing.”

Some other readers, in e-mails, have addressed the editors as "comrades’’ and argued that our coverage is left of Joseph Stalin and that we are part of some great left-wing media conspiracy that aims to destroy our great nation.

We take some comfort in noting the frequency of complaints about our right-wing bias roughly matches the number of complaints that we are part of a leftist conspiracy. We get about as many complaints that our coverage of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’ demonstrates a pro-gay agenda as we do concerns that our reportage contributes to homophobic hysteria.

We believe that Spc. McCormick’s letter does offer us the opportunity to discuss the editorial choices we make each day.

Our mandate from Congress -- the same one that requires that we be an independent source of news and information -- also prohibits Stars and Stripes from taking an editorial stance. Our editorials and opinion columns are supposed to come from other, commercial news organizations. Our choices should reflect a broad sampling of the commentary published in America. We are also required to provide a balanced view, one that offers a fair sampling of opinions pro and con on a given issue.

Balance, of course, does not mean the exact number of column inches for one side must precisely equal the inches for the other side. Nor does it mean one pro and one con on the same day. It means that over time and taken as a whole the coverage is balanced and that we fairly reflect the pro and the con, the right and the left. We believe our opinion pages pass the test.

For example, on Sept. 2 we published an opinion column from the Washington Post that was critical the conservative Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall in Washington. On Sept. 17, we published a column that took aim at the tea party. And on Oct. 21, we published a Kathleen Parker column that skewered Palin, Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell and other conservative “mean girls.” Any one of these columns would probably hew closer to Spc. McCormick’s political tastes.

However, we believe that simple balance is not enough. Our aim is to use the opinion pages to promote debate. We want those pages to be provocative. While maintaining the overall balance, we want our editors to select opinion pieces not because of the stance taken, but because of the quality of the argument.

In the near future, we plan to expand the amount of commentary available on stripes.com, which does not have the space limitations of the newspaper. In the expanded opinion section we intend to provide a wider but still balanced sampling of leading opinion. Some will be published directly on our pages. In other cases we will provide links to relevant commentary that we don’t have the rights to publish.

We have no desire to shape opinion. Our goal is not to provide opinion that we believe matches your own. Instead, we want to provide commentary that stirs emotion, and the debate.

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