Editor's Note: Check your biases when reading the news

Bottomly wrote about the letters she’s received in these early days of Trump’s second term — from people wanting more critical coverage of the president and those who see every story as Trump bashing.

(My thought when I read it was, “Oh good, I’m not the only one hearing that.”)

“But we’re not here to placate one side or the other,” she writes. “… As a local news organization, our time is best spent on reporting the facts about how [Trump’s] policies change the lives of Oregonians.”

I agree — a journalist’s time IS best spent reporting the facts, regardless of how those facts are received. When we publish each edition, I’m not thinking, “I hope everyone likes it;” I’m thinking, “This is information our community needs to make informed decisions.”

Being called too liberal or too conservative isn’t new — I’ve been hearing that since I started my journalism career 14 years ago — and neither is being told our coverage is “too political” (or biased, or uninformed, or just plain stupid). I’m not sure how to write about the effects of federal policies on the local level without bringing politics into it, as we have a president and administration very much at the center of these changes, not to mention one of the hallmarks of a free press is keeping government officials accountable. But we hear that even when we’re writing about city council and school board meetings, or run a monthly sponsored religious column, or print letters to the editor on any topic.

Most of the criticism we receive concerning our reporting / columns / opinion page isn’t so much about the stories themselves as it is the way people perceive them: I don’t agree with what was said or how you’ve said it, and you didn’t include / consider / research this one thing I think is important, so therefore, you are wrong.

A lot of times, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We can’t be everything to everyone, so it’s good that we’re not trying to be.

Maybe you’ve heard this saying before: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job as a journalist to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the window and find out which is true.”

That’s what we’re doing: Looking out the window, reporting the facts and striving for accuracy. And we’re going to keep doing it.