Is the Baltimore Sun conservative?

[Archae]

Just wondering...

[JonLP24]

1. Not that I know of

David Simon was a longtime reporter and still regularly contributes who is far from a conservative.

The Baltimore Sun has been home to some of the best American writers, including reporter, essayist, and language scholar H.L. Mencken, who enjoyed a forty-plus year association with the paper. Other notable journalists, editors and cartoonists on the staff of Sun papers include Rafael Alvarez, Richard Ben Cramer, Russell Baker, A. Aubrey Bodine, John Carroll, James Grant, Turner Catledge, Edmund Duffy, Thomas Edsall, John Filo, Jon Franklin, Jack Germond, Mauritz A. Hallgren, David Hobby, Brit Hume, Gwen Ifill, Gerald W. Johnson, Kevin P. Kallaugher (KAL), Murray Kempton, Frank Kent, Tim Kurkjian, Laura Lippman, William Manchester, sportscaster Jim McKay, Kay Mills, Reg Murphy, Thomas O'Neill, Drew Pearson, Ken Rosenthal, Louis Rukeyser, Dan Shaughnessy, David Simon, Michael Sragow, John Steadman, and Jules Witcover. The paper has won 15 Pulitzer Prizes.


Brit Hume sticks out to me but David Simon is one of the best. They in-fact sued a Republican governor

Controversies

The paper became embroiled in a controversy involving the former governor of Maryland, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R). Ehrlich had issued an executive order on November 18, 2004 banning state executive branch employees from talking to Sun columnist Michael Olesker and reporter David Nitkin, claiming that their coverage had been unfair to the administration. This led The Sun to file a First Amendment lawsuit against the Ehrlich administration. The case was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge, and The Sun appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the dismissal.[17]

The same Olesker was forced to resign on January 4, 2006, after being accused of plagiarism. The Baltimore City Paper reported that several of his columns contained sentences or paragraphs that were extremely similar (although not identical) to material previously published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Sun.[18] Several of his colleagues both in and out of the paper were highly critical of the forced resignation, taking the view that the use of previously published boilerplate material was common newsroom practice, and Olesker's alleged plagiarism was in line with that practice.[19]

Between 2006 and 2007, Thomas Andrews Drake, a former National Security Agency executive, allegedly leaked classified information to Siobhan Gorman, then a national security reporter for The Sun. Drake was charged in April 2010 with 10 felony counts in relation to the leaks.[20] In June 2011, all 10 original charges were dropped, in what was widely viewed as an acknowledgement that the government had no valid case against the whistleblower, who eventually pleaded to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer. Drake was the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Sun

[Bluenorthwest]

3. H.L. Mencken was an anti democratic elitist who literally opposed representative democracy

He also wrote long, horrifically racist essays not just about black people but about African Americans in particular, along with antisemitic screeds so vile he removed many of them from post war editions.
Mencken opposed democracy and favored rule by a selected elite, so when you read his comments about how stupid the voting public is and how degenerate their choices, he is not being Will Rogers, he's telling you what he thinks, that regular people are incapable of taking part in their own governance.

So if he's a founding philosophy of that paper, one has to assume much of that crap still flourishes there if they are still promoting his tenure as a positive. Most liberals who cite Mencken have no clue what the man believed, and they assume his comments are sarcastic when they are utterly sincere.

[JonLP24]

4. I'm not familiar with him

Last edited Fri Jun 26, 2015, 10:01 PM - Edit history (1)

I was just posting the wiki on the notable journalists they had so the poster can make up his own judgments. Don't know if the Sun promotes him, just his name was added by a contributor to Wikipedia probably. I have no idea what he's ever said much less making a case for him.

These are the headlines they have on the front page

Antietam, other parks stop selling items with the Confederate flag

Hogan says no to Red Line, yes to Purple

Baltimore police rebuked for 'uncorroborated' gang threat report on day of Freddie Gray funeral

'Relentlessly Gay' yard fundraiser ends -- after $43,000 in donations

Creation of medical cannabis industry heads into final stage

Justice officials outline how they will investigate the Baltimore Police Department

http://www.baltimoresun.com/

I think it depends on Editors, managers, etc. Outside of that it probably depends on the journalist as the Sun has had some excellent ones and very bad ones over the course of its history. Personally, in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 8-1 I don't see how they could stay in business in last couple decades or so being a Republican paper. When it comes to city level politicians all they have are Democrats to cover good or bad.

[Igel]

5. So if X is true,

and if Y is true,
then Z is true.

Contingencies are great, but they really don't tell us much. To actually have an argument or proof you need something in there that decides the matter, like some evidence that X ("Mencken provided a founding philosophy&quot and Y ("that founding philosophy hasn't been replaced or denied&quot are true.

Mencken, BTW, was hilarious. He doesn't profit from citing his curmudeonly utteranaces since he died so many years ago. He may have been an anti-democratic elitist, but much of what he said is still (a) funny, (b) scathingly accurate. Esp. if quoted a bit out of context (and anything quoted from the 1920s and '30s that's less than a few dozen pages is likely to be quoted at least a bit out of context).

He also wrote The American Language, which was the first description of American English that got some things right. For example, it's still often quoted for the grammatical rule that decides when many Americans use phrases like "Sally and me" versus "Sally and I". Most grammarians assume, inaccurately, that it's just hypercorrection at play. Nah. The rule works, has been stable for over a hundred years, and is still routinely dismissed as "ungrammatical" because it's not Standard English. For an elitist to show that working-class English is grammatical and follows its own amazingly standard and consistent rules entirely apart from Standard English is pretty stunning. (Labels really are a way of making fuzzy reality into crisp, clear categories.) Bloomfieldian, even.

[leftofcool]

2. About half and half I think.

I didn't read it much when we lived in DC.