Is this apology too little too late? After one year of bashing Trump, and with only one week left before the election, does this apology really matter now?
A central Florida newspaper has apologized to its readers for the decidedly anti-Donald Trump coverage that has been published during the election.
The Daily Commercial published an editorial titled “The media, the election and bias” on Oct. 23 that explained the paper is reliant on wire services for much of its election coverage and those reports are weighted heavily against Trump.
“The Daily Commercial hasn’t done enough to mitigate the anti-Trump wave in the pages of this paper,” it wrote. “You deserve a more balanced approach to the coverage of elections and other weighty issues.”
In what it described as an “open letter” that it described as “part explanation, part reflection and part mea culpa” the paper apologized to its readers.
Why, you may ask, do we feel the need to broach this topic at this late date in the election? Frankly, an uncomfortably sizable number of our readers have been writing and calling to express their dissatisfaction with what they believe is the media’s bias toward Donald Trump, and they are pointed in their criticism of the Daily Commercial, which they believe has gotten swept up in the anti-Trump wave. We felt we owed you a response.
Has the media been biased against Trump? Yes, we believe so, especially lately. Trump’s every utterance, no matter how innocuous, is now parsed, analyzed and criticized by a litany of political pundits. The wire services that the Daily Commercial subscribes to churn out stories almost daily that fact check Trump, which is warranted given his penchant for exaggeration and duplicity. Yet those same services turn out so few stories that fact check Clinton, who also has a strained relationship with the truth.
And while hundreds of stories have attempted to shed light on Trump’s feelings about women, minorities, his business dealings, his taxes and more, so little has been written about some of Clinton’s questionable decisions as secretary of state, her emails and the fact that she and Bill have somehow amassed incredible wealth during their political careers. That certainly deserves scrutiny.
Here’s the mea culpa: The Daily Commercial hasn’t done enough to mitigate the anti-Trump wave in the pages of this paper. We’ve tried to be circumspect about the stories we run, the headlines we put on them, the political cartoons we publish (we recently abandoned our usual cartoonists in favor of a service that is not so unrelentingly anti-Trump). Our editors have even re-edited some wire stories that we thought used loaded language to describe Trump. But in retrospect, we haven’t gone far enough.
