The Readers' Editor Writes on The Hindu's Coverage L-affaire Gopalaswamy

Today's opinion by the Readers' Editor is reasonably well written. It points out the one-sided coverage of the paper on the CEC v. EC controversy. 

Mr.Ram defends the one-sided coverage as 'value judgment' and having nothing to do with fairness. It is true that newspapers seldom entertain the entire range of views on any subject - at some point, the editor must decide what to publish and what to exclude - but it is stupid for a newspaper claiming to be more than a mouthpiece of a particular party to insist that value judgment has nothing to do with fairness. Where an alternative perspective is equally plausible as in this case and many eminent writers indeed made a well-argued case for a contrasting view, the liberal idea of viewpoint diversity and the compelling nature of counterarguments very much warranted their publication. To claim otherwise may be within the editor's discretion but it suggests an illiberal mindset and a cloistered worldview. If those indeed are the values the chief editor espouses, they reflect poorly on his newspaper.

The Reader's Editor says that he is told that the letters that appear in the paper represent a fair proportion of letters received. I have no statistics to disprove this but having carefully observed the sort of letters that get published, I am strongly inclined to look at such a claim as nothing short of facetious. The majority of published letters are laudatory and only the last one or two in a long list happen to be modestly critical. It is quite inconceivable that every editorial position always receives a favorable response in the very same proportion.