mjh – It’s fallacious to pick a single day’s paper and try to say anything useful about fairness and balance, any more than I could pick a single rainy day and say that the drought’s over. Take a couple of weeks’ coverage, do an honest assessment of postive/negative Bush/Kerry coverage and then you might have something.

My personal experience as, to borrow Clandestino’s phrase, “one who works in a local newsroom,” is that readers with strong views on any polarized issue tend to view the newspaper as strongly biased against them and in favor of their opponents, no matter what we do. Rush Limbaugh and Amy Goodman have both made a cottage industry out of this truism – though Rush’s cottage seems quite a bit larger.