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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Opinion

McCain milks column rejection

J.R. Labbe

Conservative talking heads and e-mail chatter were ablaze Tuesday after the Drudge Report posted a piece Monday that claimed the New York Times rejected a guest column from Sen. John McCain because it did not “mirror” one published a week earlier by Sen. Barack Obama.

It’s the best thing to happen to the McCain campaign this week. He needed the boost. Obama’s tour to Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe with major TV anchors in tow had relegated McCain to B-roll of him riding in a golf cart with Papa Bush and sitting at a Yankees game with Rudy Giuliani.

Nothing can jump-start a Republican’s campaign faster than a perceived slight by the big bad liberal media.

“Bias!” cried Republicans, who are in a 4-foot hover over the fact that the Times’ opinion page editor, David Shipley, served as a special assistant and speechwriter to President Clinton from 1995 to 1997.

Please. Throughout the country, former politicos, speechwriters and aides to politicians from both sides of the aisle labor at America’s newspapers.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram had a former aide to Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen serving on the editorial board at one time; today the paper has a former Bush administration communications person working on the news copy desk.

Opinion page editors make daily judgment calls on which guest columns to print and which won’t see the light of day.

The Star-Telegram receives dozens of unsolicited columns weekly. We try to make sure that our pages reflect a variety of ideologies, opinions and ideas, and especially to include op-ed pieces that take positions contrary to those in our editorials.

We still get accused of favoring one camp over another, but those accusations are in themselves fairly balanced. Half our readers think we’re liberal; half think we’re conservative. That’s a record we can live with.

But the bottom line on what gets published versus what gets a polite “no thanks” is the uniqueness of the thoughts presented and the quality of the writing.

Does the column move an issue forward by framing it in a way not previously stated? Is it a compelling read?

Does it, above all, express strong opinion?

(You’d be surprised – or maybe you wouldn’t – by how many submissions we receive from politicians that are devoid of opinion at all, and amount to little more than “aren’t I wonderful” puffery or “isn’t my opponent awful” diatribe.)

The New York Times controls what appears on its pages, which, like it or not, are valuable real estate.

That said, it will also have to take the heat for refusing the McCain piece after running one from Obama.

But it’s important to note that the column wasn’t rejected because of the author’s party affiliation or political viewpoint; Shipley rejected it because it did not meet the criteria for what he wanted to present his readers.

According to Drudge, Shipley e-mailed McCain’s staff Friday to explain why he was passing on the column.

“It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written. … I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft.”

Oh, the number of times that last sentence has been typed by op-ed editors to potential column writers.

It is a standard industry practice to ask for rewrites.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. In these days of shrinking staff levels, mostly we just say no thanks and keep moving.

The fact that McCain’s folks were encouraged to submit another draft derails the argument that Shipley was trying to keep McCain’s voice from his page.

If the Fort Worth Star-Telegram were to run pieces from Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and his Democratic challenger, Rick Noriega, for example, both would receive the same ground rules of what we would accept. If one complied and the other didn’t, we’d go back to the candidate who didn’t and give him a chance to try again. If that person’s campaign wanted to, it could make the same kind of kerfuffle that McCain’s campaign is making about the Times.

Shipley’s supposed crime in the eyes of conservatives was that he injected partisan politics into a decision-making process they think should be party blind.

McCain’s people turned this into a media conspiracy against their man and, in the process, managed to get more eyeballs on McCain’s deconstruction of Obama’s “plan for victory” than ever would have perused it in the Times.

For McCain, Shipley’s decision was a win-win.

Jill “J.R.” Labbe is deputy editorial page editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Her e-mail address is jrlabbe@star-telegram.com.