I spoke to all three of the Republican candidates on Saturday and each confirmed that the Chronicle didn’t bother to talk to them. Which is both unfortunate for the voters and sad for a once proud journalistic enterprise. If you think about it, it is appalling that they wouldn’t even pretend to be interested. We who live online and do not rely upon a “newspaper of record” can scoff at their influence but for many elderly voters in Harris County, the truth is that they still rely upon the Chronicle for information and have no idea how biased the editorial board has become. The paper lists these members of their board:
- Jack Sweeney
- Jeff Cohen
- John Wilburn
- Steve Jetton
- David Langworthy
- Tim Fleck
- Lisa Gray
In speaking with many Republican judicial candidates that appeared before this board, the majority of the interviews were with three members, never more, and sometimes only two. Several of the judicial candidates left the interviews feeling as though they were berated and called racist, even some of the ones the Chronicle ultimately endorsed. I’ve tried to get the judges to speak out publicly to no avail. If you can persuade one or two to speak out, it would be most helpful.
The paper’s bias isn’t limited to their editorial board. Cory Crow at Harris County Almanac noted this about the profiles R.G. Ratcliffe and Joe Holley ran this weekend:
ChronBlog runs dual profiles of the two major candidates for Texas Goober. Perry’s was negative in tone (the gist being that he has moved right over the years) while White’s was just cloyingly bad. (Who really believes that he was thinking about energy policy at age 12?) All in all they’re fitting capstones to ChronBlog’s terrible election coverage this year.
That isn’t the first time they’ve run biased profiles in this race. Shortly before I went on vacation in August, the Chronicle ran long form profiles by the same two writers. I had picked up a hard copy at the airport to read and found them, and took a picture that I had planned to use earlier but forgot about until Cory brought it up yesterday. Compare these two articles, both in terms of negativity towards Gov. Perry and in length of type:
Houston Chronicle Gubernatorial Candidate Profiles 8-22-2010
Pay particular attention to the “Highlights from Bill White’s Resume” and the two highlights on Gov. Perry: “The Value of Perry’s Blind Trust” and “Some of Perry’s Business Connections”.
Blatantly biased reporting.
For the record, the Harris County Republican Party has some great candidates for the three positions noted above:
- County Clerk: Stan Stanart
- District Clerk: Chris Daniel
- County Tax Assessor Collector: Don Sumners
I hope that each of you will vote a straight Republican ticket (remember to cross over for Jeff Weems) and tell old school media types to stick it in their ear with their biased coverage of elections.
(once again, my thanks to Dean Betz and Dwight Silverman for allowing the Republican Judicial Q & A’s to be featured alongside their Democratic opponents on the Chronicle’s Politics page)