Back in June, in a column headlined, “Our space is your space,” we began a conversation that I had hoped wouldn’t be too one-sided, with me doing all of the talking.
Since you invite us into your homes each day, I invited you to drop us a line occasionally to let us know how this relationship of ours was working out.
The Post’s editorial pages should be a community sounding board, I wrote, and for that to work we needed to hear from you.
Well, you’ve been heard.
Our front-page editorial last Sunday regarding Gov. Bill Ritter’s executive order giving state workers the right to unionize prompted a torrent of letters to the editor, phone calls, e-mails and website comments.
Many of you didn’t like the editorial’s content, or its tone. And you really didn’t like its placement on the front page.
“I was appalled to pick up my Sunday Denver Post to find an editorial blazing down the front page,” Marcia Desmond of Longmont wrote. “What has happened to journalistic integrity? The front page is for news, not opinion.”
Letter-writer Lee Thomas asked: “Has the Denver Post given up all pretense of being an impartial, professional newspaper?”
Martha Adelmann of Centennial asked for an apology. “To put an opinion piece on the front page of the newspaper is an insult to my intelligence,” she wrote.
And those were among the more polite letters.
Front-page editorials are a rare species. As they should be.
At The Post, we’ve run only four in the modern era, dating back to 1946 when Palmer Hoyt re-established the paper’s editorial pages and pushed opinion pieces off the cover. Until then, front-page opinion pieces were fairly common. In fact, many newspapers were created to peddle an opinion, rather than report news.
In 1974, The Post penned a cover piece after President Nixon’s resignation. The other three front-page editorials have come in the past seven years.
In the days after the disputed 2000 presidential election, The Post warned the candidates against leading the country into a constitutional crisis.
In 2005, it was matters closer to home. Colorado’s budget was struggling to recover from the recession, and the editorial board wrote a front-page plea for voters to approve Referendum C to temporarily lift the state’s revenue caps.
And then, of course, there was last Sunday’s editorial blasting Ritter’s executive order.
Since our opinion pages operate independently of our newsroom, it’s understandable that readers would be jolted by its placement. (Truth be told, some of my colleagues in the newsroom were aghast at the idea, too.)
No rules forbid an editorial from sharing space on the front page with news, sports, weather and features — as long as it’s properly marked, as this one was.
And they can’t be placed there too often, but only because it lessens the impact. The motive is to draw attention to something of importance.
In this case, we felt strongly that Ritter had taken the wrong turn as governor, and that it jeopardized his agenda, which ultimately would hurt Colorado. We also thought the executive order needed a public debate, which a cover editorial could spark.
A few readers suggested that it didn’t merit being on page one, especially considering that we live in a world racked with war, poverty, terrorism, disease and famine. Too true. But a front-page editorial hammering President Bush for not finding Osama bin Laden wouldn’t change much.
If only it could.
Time certainly will tell if Ritter’s executive order merited that cover slot. We think it did. The governor, obviously, thinks otherwise.
Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
