It used to chafe at me when the newspaper for which I worked ran advertisements (known as “house ads” because the paper itself “paid” for them) exhorting or applauding any local sports team. I covered all of them at one time or another and believed that even the appearance of my employer cheerleading for any of them undermined my credibility as an impartial reporter. The worst thing you could call a sportswriter back in those days was a “homer,” though many of our readers expected us to be exactly that and objected whenever we wrote anything critical about the home team.

Politics is the one arena in life where the levels of passion and partisanship rival those found in sports. And in that arena, my former employer, The Seattle Times, recently tripped the way it routinely stubbed its toe, at least in my view, in sports.

With a full-page ad in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna in its Wednesday editions, The Times launched its “Seattle Times Initiative for Political Newspaper Advertising.” By allocating approximately $75,000 in support of McKenna and a similar sum to the campaign to approve same-sex marriage, the newspaper hopes to “prove” the efficacy of political advertising.
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