It is certainly possible that in my time here I’ve happened to interact with a pool of people with an unfair or skewed view of the Pilot. There are others–Jim, Mike, and yourself among them–who it seems would have a better handle of the overall sentiment re: the Pilot’s political leaning. This comment thread has been very informative. Thank you, sincerely.

I don’t truck with that complaint, but God knows I heard it enough over the 22 years I worked there.

Virginia has plenty of conservative papers, the Times-Dispatch and Washington Times being the most obvious examples; next to those guys, our paper is downright Bolshevik, in both fact and public image. Then again, by Massachusetts standards, The Pilot would seem pretty milquetoast.

I’d characterize its reputation as cautiously liberal. Every once in a while, an editorial packs a surprise, but in every case I can remember over the past five years, the nature of the surprise has been the boldness of the paper’s liberalism. In no case has it been because the paper went the other way.

Bear in mind that I’m speaking of the paper’s editorial positions, its known stances on the issues. The politics of its newsroom’s individual members would be mighty difficult for readers to discern, because they rarely find a voice in print. The politics of the paper’s ownership is, much to its credit, likewise hard to make out from reading the product.

Cheers,
Earl Swift

As for the Pilot’s conservative reputation, whether earned or not, I do think that this is how the majority of people view it. I don’t necessarily agree; I was just stating this as a matter of course. That phrase was not meant as a commentary.

As a former writer for the Virginian-Pilot, I can tell you the publishers are certainly conservative, as are a large number of the readership(although I would hesitate/hate to say they are a majority). Never mind the newspaper’s Letters section — we all know how such forums can easiily be hijacked by an undersized but loud and rabid minority such as, say, Tea Partyers. All public forums — including this “Comments” section itself — are liable to such appropriation. That’s one price of a democracy. So be it.

In any event, I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of the Pilot’s editorial staff (the writers, photographers, graphic artists, and broad spectrum of editors who produce the stories published in the Pilot each day — not to be confused with the staff of the editorial PAGE) are first and foremost, regardless of whether, in their private lives they are liberal, conservative, libertarian, vegan, Hindu, or heavy-metal, are, when they begin each working day, highly-trained and highly-skilled PROFESSIONALS who have demonstrated a level of critical thinking, analysis, objectivity, insight, and reasoned, objective, open-minded, dogged PERSISTENCE that has enabled them to rise this far in an extremely competitive and demanding field.

And I mean “far.” Nobody comes straight out of journalism school to a spot on the staff of a newswpaper such as this one. The Virginian-Pilot is not unlike a AAA baseball team….the last rung on a long, rugged ladder that leads to the majors (the “majors,” here, being the pinnacle for every journalist — the truly “big-city” newspapers to which countless Pilot (and Ledger-Star, for you old-timers out there) staffers have been “called up” over the years: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and others).

It’s no small achievement to be hired as a Virginian-Pilot staff writer, editor, photographer, or graphic artist, and the readership in this region needs to remind itself of what they would have without this newspaper. It is precisley institutions like the Virginian Pilot that represent the last bastion against the increasingly well-funded and well-organized legions of rabid zealots at both ends of the political spectrum, all with an agenda, none of whom has any interest in any “facts” besides those that support their case, and all of whom are willing and eager to manipulate and manufacture such “facts,” if need be, to further their cause, whose aim is to supplant or at least to control the institutions we currently call “the media.”

This fight over “facts,” over information, and over control of its flow, has become the front-line battleground in the culture war that currently envelops our nation. We need to thank our lucky stars that we have a local newspaper the quality of the Virginian-Pilot to turn to for reliable reporting in this age of vitriol, rumors, and outright lies that go viral each day on this wonderful-but-easily-exploited tool we call the Internet.

For all its faults — and every profession has them — we are fortunate, in this age of dying daily newspapers to still have one of the caliber and quality of the Pilot.

I shudder to think of what this Hampton Roads region would be like without it.

The Pilot reports on the military (as it should) and publishes some conservative columnists (for balance; again, as it should), but I would never even be tempted to say the paper has a conservative reputation.

If you read the letters to the editor, you could say the readership is conservative, but the paper itself certainly isn’t.

Don’t take my word for it, though. What do others think?

Huh?

I still think this should be called “If you had read the paper…” and ought to be expanded to include The Daily Press and other local papers.