Reading stories in the L.A. Times on the paper's new editor Dean Baquet and Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, I noticed something about the coverage: The paper is telling me a lot more about Roberts than Baquet.
Apparently it's newsworthy that Roberts' wife was president of the anti-abortion group Feminists For Life. But the reporter profiling the new editor gives me no such insights into Baquet's wife's activities. To what groups does she belong to? The ACLU? The Sierra Club? A pro-life group? You can tell a lot about a man by the groups his wife belongs to.
The Times tells me that Roberts is a conservative, but I read nothing about Baquet's ideological orientation.
I read that Roberts is a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, but I read nothing of the groups to which Baquet has belonged to.
Reporters dig up memos at the Reagan Library written by Roberts in the early '80's to help me understand his thought processes and political views, but I read nothing of comparable memos written by Mr. Baquet.
Obviously a Supreme Court justice will have a far greater impact on the future of the country than a newspaper editor. Still Times readers deserve to know as much about the ideology of the paper's new editor as we do about the next Justice.
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