J. TODD FOSTER: Sorry, Folks, Bias Charge Doesn’t Hold Up To Fact Check

Listen to Dick’s most recent phone message here.

About every two weeks, a Southwest Virginia guy named Dick calls me to leave hateful voicemails.

His beef used to be that we ran more stories on University of Tennessee football than on his beloved Virginia Tech. He also maintained we were conspiring against the Hokies by running negative stories. I have to plead guilty on that one, because we did, in fact, report that 32 Tech students and teachers had been murdered in April 2007 in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. And before that we reported on ex-quarterback Michael Vick getting charged with dog fighting.

Dick used to call me and tell me these things directly, but now he calls during times when he knows I won’t be in the office and leaves increasingly nasty messages even though I’ve told him over and over: If coach Phil Fulmer ever shoots up the UT locker room, we’ll be all over him like one of Vick’s pit-bulls on a poodle.

“You’re the editor of the National Enquirer Junior, that’s what you are,” is Dick’s new refrain. (I’m still blushing, especially after the Enquirer’s recent gotcha story on the philandering John Edwards.)

Then last week he left me another message, shortly before midnight Wednesday, alleging that I and this newspaper were in the tank for Barack Obama. Actually, I was in the bed sleeping. But the next morning I got the message. It struck me as odd, seeing that this newspaper has taken no position yet on the election. Our endorsement will run in October.
For the second straight time, Dick’s voicemail referred to Obama as “your black boy.”

Here’s the most recent voicemail verbatim: “You say Ms. Palin might not be ready for prime time. I think she’s got more on-the-job training than your black boy Hussein there, you know, who you can find no evil with, who associates with terrorists and his preacher says God d—- America and all that kind of stuff. You’re the most biased paper I’ve ever seen.”

The bias claim gets thrown around at the media like loose change. And it’s usually worth about as much. But I had to learn for myself: Was I a closet liberal, even though I oppose open borders, amnesty for illegal immigrants and affirmative action? Or was I the truly independent moderate I fashioned myself to be, a real maverick like John McCain?

On Friday, I sat down and spent four hours I didn’t have combing every newspaper we published between May 29 and Sept. 5 – a random sampling that also was readily available. I hunted for every Obama and McCain story, editorial, column and editorial cartoon.

I didn’t know what to expect: The copy editors who design our news pages run what The Associated Press puts out, and we don’t have time to keep score between the Democrats and the Republicans.

As much as I stress fairness and balance with this national election, I feared that the numbers would look bad and would only bolster Dick’s suspicions.

I’ll never get those four hours back, but I got something better: even more respect for the journalists who toil here. To paraphrase McCain: You see, my friends, the numbers were remarkable for their even-Steven qualities, despite the vagaries of what constitutes news and the fact that a wire service we have no control over produces it.

Let’s go to the numbers. During the Republican National Convention, we ran three RNC stories on page one even though we ran only one on A1 for the Democrats. But we made a judgment call here that a hurricane disrupting a national convention and the stunning and electric vice presidential selection of Sarah Palin were news. So if there was any bias, it would be against the Democratic National Convention.

Over the past three-plus months, we ran eight Obama stories on A1 and seven on McCain; virtually every front-page Obama story was about his visit to Bristol, Va., to kick off his general election campaign. If McCain comes to this region, we’ll fill the front page with his visit, too.

The Obama-McCain stories – and those concerning their running mates – were broken down into three categories: articles that were neutral because they were informational or strictly factual in nature, such as stump speeches; those that were positive for the candidates, such as local house parties during the conventions; and those that were negative because of scandal or outcries, such as that over Obama’s former preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Drum roll please.

Obama had seven positive news stories, 13 negative and 63 neutral. McCain had nine positives, 14 negatives and 57 neutrals. For Obama, it works out to be 8 percent positive, 16 percent negative and 76 percent neutral; for McCain, it’s 11 percent positive, 18 percent negative and 71 percent neutral.

Editorials, including those written by the Herald Courier or other newspapers, scored identically: two positives for each, two negatives for each and one neutral for each.

For columns, Obama got 31 to McCain’s 14, but the Democratic nominee also got a lot of negative ones. That breakdown for Obama consisted of nine positives, 11 negatives and 11 neutrals; for McCain, five positives, two negatives and seven neutrals.

The only possible area where we have demonstrated bias, and it was inadvertent, is in editorial cartoons. We have been much tougher on Obama than McCain. (The fact is that Obama is such a new and mysterious figure that cartoonists have focused on him, up until now at least, somewhat to the exclusion of McCain. Palin will change that.)

Of the 19 cartoons we’ve published on Obama, 15 have been negative and four neutral. (Cartoonists rarely draw warm and fuzzies.) For McCain, there were nine negative cartoons and four neutrals.

When I tabulated all the numbers, I sighed with relief and smiled with pride.

As for you, Dick, stop calling me. And stop leaving racist messages.

Go Vols!

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.