Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > Name That Party

Protein Wisdom tries to find the political affiliation of Tennessee State Senator John Ford in a story announcing a guilty verdict for taking bribes. He takes it as a sign of liberal bias, but I'm not so sure.

It seems to me that papers are often haphazard as to whether and when they mention party affiliation. Here's an AP piece on Idaho Senator Larry Craig's arrest that neglects to mention his party by name. (For the record, Ford is a Democrat and Craig is a Republican.)

This seems like an easy problem to solve with a style rule. Style rules are the rules publications have for punctuation, spelling, abbreviations, grammar, etc. The Associated Press Stylebook is the best known collection of style rules for newspapers.

The style rule could be as simple as "Always state an elected official's party affiliation on first reference in the article body." How hard is that?