EDITORIAL: Some rules for the election

Campaign season is upon us, which means it’s an exciting time at Triad City Beat. Election coverage is in our DNA, so our news department will be covering as many candidate forums, stump speeches, barnstorms and press gaggles as they can get to. We’ll have an election story just about every week until our Primary Guide drops on April 28, with information about every candidate in every primary in Guilford and Forsyth counties, just in time for early voting.

Here in the opinion department, which operates independently of the news department, our plan is not so clear.

Though we often lapse into what is known as the “editorial we” in our weekly missives, our department these days is really just one guy. And it’s the same guy who sells the political ads, which creates a huge potential for conflict. We’d complain to our boss about it, but he’s also the same guy.

And he’s a real stickler for journalistic ethics.

So we in the opinion department have been instructed — by ourself, you understand — not to write anything about any race in the 2022 primary on May 10, the Greensboro municipal election on July 26 nor the general election on Nov. 8. We can’t even write about the Greensboro mayor’s race, which is a hot one; the Guilford and Forsyth school board races, which have more candidates each than a proper dog race; the US Senate race, which has huge implications for the entire nation. No endorsements. No analysis. Nothing.

We will do our best to comply.

In this way, our election coverage will be entirely without spin, inclusive of every active candidate and race, designed not to influence our readers but to give them enough information to vote for the people who will best represent their views.

We can still write about politics, but the road has been considerably narrowed for the duration of campaign season. We could, for example, write about how unaffiliated voters in the North Carolina electorate will soon overtake registered Democrats to be the state’s largest voting bloc. We can write about redistricting and how it might shape our legislature. Everything else goes through the news department — they’ve got a better temperament for this sort of work, anyway.