Newspapers always have their own slants, largely depending on the owners. When I was in the Middle East, I preferred The Jerusalem Post to Haaretz, but then the Post changed ownership and I didn’t agree with it as often. And I’d read the same story in Al-Quds, an Palestinian Arabic language newspaper and get a totally different point of view. Same stories, different opinions. I rather like it that way.

During my relatively brief time in the profession I would have defended the objectivity of journalists (the print ones at least) tooth and nail. But with some distance I have come around to the view that truly objective journalism is difficult, if not impossible; reporters’ perceptions cannot help but be shaded by their personal values and life experiences. And, of course, when it comes to the editorial pages many papers have particular slants.

Still, as someone who once did a bit of reporting for the Tribune and later worked as a copy editor for the Deseret News, I do not think what you saw here was the institutional “slant” of either paper. I’m assuming these were the same AP wire stories. At both papers, they would have been selected for inclusion in that day’s paper by a wire editor, and assigned to a copy editor to fit them to the space allotted and write the headline. I cannot recall, in my time at the News, ever having a headline rejected or tweaked because it did not put the right spin on the story. The criteria were whether the headline was snappy and adequately informed the reader what the article was about. Here, there may have been space constraints: If the makeup of the papers’ respective front pages that day was such that the Trib copy editor had a little more space for a headline than did the News copy editor, then that may have allowed the Trib editor to introduce the additional element about the plan being met with skepticism. It is also possible that the headlines reflect the biases of their writers, but those would be individual biases and not those of the institution. (I think the institutional bias is more likely to come into play in deciding what to write about, in guidance from top editors as those stories are developed, and, naturally, in the opinions expressed on the editorial pages.)

The most blatant example of bias in recent years was about a decade ago. The son of an apostle was sued for sexual harassment. The Tribune gave it much more coverage than it deserved, the Deseret News gave it none. It averaged out to about the right amount in aggregate, but individuals reading either paper were not well served.

This makes me think of the David O. Mckay Rise of Modern Mormon(sensational)ism Book, which was toughted as having so much more access to scholarship, yadda yadda, because it had access to the claire middlemiss jorunals, yadda yadda, and then I picked up an old David O. McKay biography by Francis Gibbons at my in-laws which was published in 1986 which thanks Ms. Middlemiss for allowing access to the Journals in it’s forward 20 years ago.

Objectivity, Schlobjectivity…