Why We Recommend

Tuesday's editorial explains how and why The Sun News editorial board recommends candidates for elective office:

Every election season, as The Sun News rolls out its recommendations of candidates for office, we inevitably receive a few calls from readers telling us that because of our opinions, they now know exactly who not to vote for.

That's fine with us. In a way, that's almost precisely why we write them.

We're not political operatives or campaign organizers, and what we write here is not intended to drum up support for any one candidate. On the contrary, we're journalists, and our goal is to provide readers with as much information as possible about these candidates. Our primary method is through the coverage in our news pages, but an alternate source of information can be found here, in our daily editorials.

We keep these two operations - news gathering and opinion writing - as separate as possible under one roof. Our news articles are written by the beat reporters whose names you'll find in their bylines, while our editorial recommendations are decided upon by three members of our editorial board: publisher P.J. Browning, executive editor Trisha O'Connor and senior writer Robert Morris. You can be confident that reporting and recommending are two activities that do not intersect. Even if you think every opinion on this page is wrong, you should be able to maintain your trust that what you read on the front page is true, as the editorial board's views are not involved in the presentation of the news.

Over the past few weeks, the editorial board met with nearly 50 candidates for office, usually in groups of about three at a time, and discussed with them their approaches to government, the issues of the day, and their visions for the future. We also paid careful attention to the candidates as they conducted their campaigns, appeared in voters' forums and were described in our own news pages. The three of us then compared our impressions and discussed who seemed to be the best leaders of the bunch.

Those conclusions are what you'll find here over the course of the week. You may disagree. You may agree. Our hope is only that you find them interesting and, perhaps, thought-provoking.

We'd also note that one single source of information - be it us or anyone else - is probably insufficient to reasonably decide an issue as important a local election (as the city of Myrtle Beach has demonstrated over the past year, decisions made by your local government often affect your life far more directly than anything your president, governor or congressman does).

Try to seek out the candidates in person - over this week most of them will likely be easy to find. If not, many list their phone numbers in their campaign literature - call and ask them the questions that are important to you.

And if our opinions do give you a good idea of who not to vote for, well, we hope you'll call. It won't feel like election season if you don't.

We keep these two operations - news gathering and opinion writing - as separate as possible under one roof. Our news articles are written by the beat reporters whose names you'll find in their bylines, while our editorial recommendations are decided upon by three members of our editorial board: publisher P.J. Browning, executive editor Trisha O'Connor and senior writer Robert Morris. You can be confident that reporting and recommending are two activities that do not intersect. Even if you think every opinion on this page is wrong, you should be able to maintain your trust that what you read on the front page is true, as the editorial board's views are not involved in the presentation of the news.

Over the past few weeks, the editorial board met with nearly 50 candidates for office, usually in groups of about three at a time, and discussed with them their approaches to government, the issues of the day, and their visions for the future. We also paid careful attention to the candidates as they conducted their campaigns, appeared in voters' forums and were described in our own news pages. The three of us then compared our impressions and discussed who seemed to be the best leaders of the bunch.

Those conclusions are what you'll find here over the course of the week. You may disagree. You may agree. Our hope is only that you find them interesting and, perhaps, thought-provoking.

We'd also note that one single source of information - be it us or anyone else - is probably insufficient to reasonably decide an issue as important a local election (as the city of Myrtle Beach has demonstrated over the past year, decisions made by your local government often affect your life far more directly than anything your president, governor or congressman does).

Try to seek out the candidates in person - over this week most of them will likely be easy to find. If not, many list their phone numbers in their campaign literature - call and ask them the questions that are important to you.

And if our opinions do give you a good idea of who not to vote for, well, we hope you'll call. It won't feel like election season if you don't.