OxBlog

Saturday, June 19, 2004

# Posted 2:43 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

HEADLINE POLITICS: In response to my post on the NYT-WaPo headline duel, LS -- a professional journalists at a major daily paper -- puts it far better than I did:
I don't have any inside scoop on the NYTimes, but from where I sit, as an editorial writer for a page that is a lot more conservative than the newsroom, I can say with some assurance that what looks like "spillage" only happens when the newsroom and the editorial page are staffed by people who already agree. That is, the news pages would be exactly the way they
are if the editorial page weren't there at all.

The same has been true at the three papers I worked for before I came here, and other edit writers I know who are in the same situation say it has been their experience as well, so I think what you see is not the result of any influence by edit pages on the news coverage but simply the fact that the edit pages of big newspapers are more likely to be liberal than to be conservative, and so are the newsroom staff.
Interesting. One has to respect all those papers that put up a firewall between politics and opinion, but that wall may not be effective until the journalistic professional begins to represent a broader array of political opinions.
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