Baltimore 'Sun' Considers Governor's Complaints

By: Joe Strupp A month after Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich issued his controversial ban on state employees talking to two writers at The Sun of Baltimore late last year, the governor met with Sun editors and submitted a list of 23 complaints he had about the paper's coverage of his administration.

During the past several months, the Sun's public editor, Paul Moore, has reviewed the complaints and found that just three of the instances were true journalistic errors. In a lengthy column published today, Moore detailed each grievance, followed by an explanation. In most cases, he determined that the paper had not erred.

Ehrlich Press Secretary Shareese DeLeaver, however, called the column "an inadequate response" to the complaints. "We feel it is the equivalent of a fox guarding the hen house," she told E&P this afternoon.

But Moore told E&P: "The sweeping scope of their complaints -- that this represented gross inaccuracies -- did not hold up. There were instances where stories could have been executed better, but did not include the kind of mistakes the list claimed."

He added: "I tried to look at the specifics [of the complaints] and, proportionally, it looked pretty good. After the fact of publication, you could go back and dissect stories that could have been better worded, organized better, or written better."


Moore's column comes on the same day that Ehrlich's office is releasing 20 pages of documents related to the ban on the Sun writers, in response to a public information request by The Sun and The Gazette chain of newspapers, Moore said.

Ehrlich's ban against columnist Michael Olesker and statehouse bureau chief David Nitkin went into effect in November. The Sun sued the governor earlier this year seeking to have the ban lifted, but that suit was dismissed. The paper has fild an appeal, which is pending.

His complaints included accusations that letters to the editor were overly tilted against him, that headlines were misleading in some cases, and even that the lieutenant governor's laughter was misleading described as "Ha-ha-ha."

Moore determined the following complaints to be valid:

? A Sept. 23, 2004, Nitkin story about proposed health care cuts, which Ehrlich contends wrongly indicated he believed that eliminating programs was the only way to close a budget gap. Moore found that "the article should have said slower growth in programs and spending cuts rather than the elimination of programs" in referring to the governor's plan. He also noted that a correction had been published.

? A Nov. 16, 2004, Olesker column in which the columnist described an Ehrlich spokesman as "struggling mightily to keep a straight face" while saying that there was no effort to seek political gain from a commercial. Ehrlich said Olesker was not in the room during the comment, so he could not have seen the facial expression. Moore acknowledged that the decision to describe the facial expression was "a major lapse in judgment." He also said that he had addressed the incident in a Nov. 28 public editor column and that Olesker had apologized in his Nov. 24 column.

? A Dec. 1, 2004, story about a group planning to sue the state over a plan to widen highways, which did not include a comment from state highway officials. Moore found that "the article was accurate, but should have been more thoroughly reported with additional comments from other state officials."

Ehrlich also complained that a LexisNexis search by his office found that the name "Ehrlich" had been misspelled in the Sun more than 80 times. Moore said the paper is correcting the misspellings.