Fraters Libertas

Measuring Up

Star Tribune "reader's rep" Kate Parry departs from custom this week and uses her column to actually address real complaints from readers (what a novel concept):

"Twins, Hennepin have stadium deal" proclaimed the lead front-page headline on Sunday, April 24. "Will it fly?" was the front-page headline Monday. "Pawlenty: Twins plan reasonable" led Tuesday's front page.

That was when frustrated reader Dennis Wagner e-mailed this observation: "Interesting there wasn't an opposing view with similar inches in the Star Tribune on the stadium deal. Fair and balanced, or bought and paid for?" asked Wagner, who lives in the Jordan neighborhood and is sales and marketing director for Gryphics, a high-tech firm in Plymouth. He was joined by a furious flurry of readers objecting to the stadium plan and feeling underrepresented in coverage.

A taxpayer financed stadium proposal is big news here in the Twin Cities and the Strib feels that it's important to provide fair and balanced coverage:

Editor Anders Gyllenhaal disagrees that opponents were underrepresented in initial coverage. "Opponents are quoted in every single story that's been done," he said, calling the coverage "decidedly balanced," with multiple opponents quoted in each package. "My goal is to provide coverage that's straight down the middle," he said.

"Straight down the middle" sounds like a noble goal indeed. But how to measure your objectivity on the matter?

One way to examine balance is to measure space devoted to opposing views. I don't look for perfectly equal space, but I get wary when I see big disparities over several days. I got out the ruler and here's what I found:

First-day coverage that ran Sunday, April 24, included 100.5 column inches of story, headlines, photos and graphics. Of that, 3.5 inches were about concerns raised about the plan, 13 inches went to proponents and the rest to explaining the details....

...On Monday morning, the coverage totaled 87 inches. Of that, 1.25 inches of text came from opponents and 3 inches from clear supporters -- most of that story was about whether the deal could make it through the County Board and Legislature. Four quotes from citizens on page one included two favoring the deal, one unsure and one against. On an inside page, one more citizen was quoted opposing it and two favored it.

On the third day, in 114 inches of coverage, there were two quotes for and two quotes against on page one, but you had to read 53 inches into the package before learning that the Minneapolis legislative delegation was split -- a development I thought should have been mentioned on page one even if it couldn't be fully explored until further down in the story. On the editorial page the newspaper endorsed the plan, and ran three opposing letters and one favoring it.

On the fourth day, opponents were the central focus of a story on a County Board meeting. But that stadium story ended up back on the Metro/State cover -- not buried, but not page one. Managing editor Scott Gillespie noted that with the board postponing its vote, the story lacked an outcome.

I applaud Parry's willingness to analyze the paper's coverage of the stadium issue. And it looks like she's come up with a viable, if not perfect method for measuring the bias of the newspaper toward each side of the issue. Obviously it's important to know if the paper really is providing coverage on the stadium that is "straight down the middle", as they aim to.

In the last ten years, the Star Tribune has probably received 12,876,546 complaints of liberal bias in their coverage of politics. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been an in-house analysis of the newspaper's balance in this area. Now that Perry has established a rough procedure by which to measure such balance, would it not make sense for the paper to perform the same sort of focused analysis on their political coverage?

Don't put that ruler away just yet Kate. There's plenty of measuring yet to do.