Looking back on the KNS coverage
As regular (or even sporadic) readers of this blog probably know, I was one of three Knoxville-area bloggers to volunteer to cover the News Sentinel's reportage of its editor's lawsuit against Knox County Commission. Since the editor is the lead plaintiff in the case, the paper has an automatic and obvious conflict of interest in covering the story; for that reason, Editor Jack McElroy made an entirely reasonable call for outsiders to examine the paper's coverage for indications of bias or compromises of objectivity.
That's exactly what I've spent the last three weeks trying to do. I've gone out of my way to make my critiques non-personal, and to focus entirely on the words of the finished articles as they appear in the newspaper. Although the trial isn't over yet, enough articles have accumulated by now to enable me to look back on them as an emerging body of work.
Looking through the posts I've written on the News Sentinel's coverage of the trial (all of which are aggregated here), I count 24 news articles which have appeared in the printed version of the paper. Of those 24, I have identified 10 with significant problems of bias or slant.
Of course, that means the majority of the 24 (the remaining 14) had no problems at all (and I've made a deliberate effort to mention those); however, those 10 problematic articles out of 24 amount to 42 percent of the coverage.
That isn't such a hot record.
I'll have a lot more to say about this experiment after it's over (and please, Dear Lord, don't let there be endless appeals of the outcome); for now, I'll just say that if Mr. McElroy wants to make processes like this transparent and credible, he should encourage his editors and reporters to engage with bloggers in an open, public, and transparent way. The process of critiquing the news would have been more complete, and I believe more beneficial, if News Sentinel staff had been encouraged to respond to these critiques.
Maybe they feel that public comments on the trial coverage could somehow jeopardize the suit; that could be a valid concern. But it would seem to me that any effective outreach to bloggers as a market segment and as a community remains incomplete unless there is an open, responsive, and transparent dialogue as part of the process.
I won't bite. I promise.