Arthur Alpert Pic2I take care when criticizing news coverage lest my own biases lead me astray. I would hate to find skullduggery in a difference of news judgment or call a story “slanted” when the editor had to trim it to fit the news hole.

But the Albuquerque Journal’s use of its news pages to further its partisan agenda is so blatant it’s impossible to mistake.

Take its publication of an Associated Press story on Sarah Palin’s last day as Alaska’s governor, Monday, July 27, A6, also used by the N.Y. Times.

AP quoted one Palin admirer and one Palin critic. The Journal dropped one. Can you guess which?

Here’s some of what the Journal cut:

“Larry Landry, 51, of Fairbanks held up a red, white and blue sign that that read, ” Quitting: the new American value.” The other side read: ”Thanks for the laughs.”

Consider, too, the Journal’s AP  story on the federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 (Friday, July 24, A12). The sub-head, “Increase Could Cause Layoffs”, was perfect, for the story pushed that political line in its first four paragraphs. Not until graph five did we learn it’s not Gospel.

Nor did the “story” provide context, the kind offered by (ultra-Establishment) Time Magazine August 3:

“From 1973 to 2007, as the minimum wage fell 22 percent in real dollars, domestic corporate profits jumped more than 50 percent–bloating the gap between rich and poor and fueling calls for a $10 an hour ‘living wage’ by 2010.”

The Journal skews its health care coverage differently. There, the newspaper’s strategy is to ignore the basic story–how our current system works for New Mexicans.

The Journal doesn’t talk to insured individuals or families struggling to pay. Or, to the insured who lose their jobs. Those bankrupted by health crises must not live around here, for we don’t read about them, or about the uninsured.

It’s as if these people are all figments of the leftist imagination. And if they don’t exist, who needs reform?

To its credit, the Journal does feature Winthrop Quigley’s admirable analyses of the health business and schemes for reform. Quigley, a specialist, provides valuable information and insights and–hats off!–makes plain his pro-business assumptions.

But he works at a certain level of abstraction, talking to experts, mostly, whose comments he orders excellently. That’s useful but doesn’t compensate for all the untold stories.

What about the doctors? Since I am old-verging-on-ancient, I see lots of them and–Newsflash!–they cannot stand private insurance companies. Too much interference, they say. They dislike Medicare, too, often because it underpays them.

(Two physicians who praised insurers were intent on climbing the ladder at their HMO.)

What about small business owners? Having been one myself, I’d like to know how they’re dealing with employee health care.

Nationally, the Journal hasn’t told you some businesses favor systemic change, as the Washington Post reported July 23 in a story headlined, “Employers Are Far From Unified Against Overhaul”.

True, this may be just a difference in news judgment; perhaps Journal editors were un-impressed that Wal-Mart and Kelly Services favor an employer mandate, as do some small and medium-sized businesses.

Or it may be the Journal’s political agenda. I don’t know, but it looks like a pattern–promotion of a partisan political agenda in the news pages in defiance of journalistic decency.

What I cannot grasp is why, why the Journal thus insults readers and its own journalists.