Mainstream: Is anyone in the middle?

Drop "Doonesbury"?

No, we're not going to do that, although a persistent body of our readers would like The Seattle Times to drop these two most irksome members of our daily and Sunday commentary roster: Garry Trudeau's comic strip and the Molly Ivins column. Another faction of readers is equally persistent in trying to get us to cancel Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, Collin Levey and, by the way, get yourself another letters editor.

See the pattern? While most readers are perfectly content to allow a variety of voices and opinions flow through these pages, our most careful and biased readers believe these pages are, you pick one: anti-Israel, pro-George Bush, anti-Bush, slanted hard left or hard right.

Centrist columnists, such as The Washington Post's David Broder, who writes today on the California populism of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, receive the least amount of protest — perhaps because being reasonable has no fan club.

Same for Leonard Pitts Jr., whose column today on the loss of "mainstream" entertainment is worth reading. Pitts asks, now that Johnny is gone and Bill Cosby's show is retired, where is the mainstream?

Mainstream is not cherished by our most vocal readers because those columnists do not prove the biases that right- and left-wingers attribute to these pages.

We had a small flurry of protests about Armstrong Williams, the national commentator who admitted receiving thousands of dollars from the Bush administration to say nice things about the federal No Child Left Behind law. People demanded we drop his column, but the trouble was, we never ran it. Belatedly, we discovered a Williams' Web site had listed The Seattle Times as a client newspaper, although we never were.

Same for Maggie Gallagher, whose column ran briefly on these pages many years ago. Gallagher has recently been targeted for writing a pamphlet used by the government and not admitting her fee in subsequent columns on the benefits of marriage.

But one can see a trend. If a columnist accepts a speaking fee, does that amount to disclosure of a bias? The weapons used to mute columnists such as Molly Ivins (writing in tomorrow's pages about the Bush administration's Orwellian-speak on Social Security) or Charles Krauthammer (writing tomorrow on the Democrats' missteps in opposing the nomination of Dr. Condoleezza Rice) is to attack their presence and credibility rather than their views.

Is Krauthammer on the take from the Bushies? asked the usual readers. Why can't you show a current photo of Ivins? ask her usual critics. The answers are no, we don't think so, and we run the photo of Molly sent to us by her syndicate, same as the other columnists.

To drop "Doonesbury" or John Leo's column because they grind at the biases of some readers is not healthy for editorial and opinion pages. Recently, Krauthammer has been singled out as a shill for Israel, while those regular readers who believe The Times is deeply anti-Israel simply accept his views as their own version of "mainstream."

After NEXT

That's why presenting fewer voices of opinion hurts, and why this Sunday's last NEXT page is difficult to treat as anything but a loss. For two years, the back page of this section was given over to younger readers, people who shared their lives — and biases — with us. They wrote about life after college with no job, about living with parents and peers, about their first steps into true adulthood and the world they will make. They turned out to be liberals and conservatives, just like the generations that preceded their moment in America.

We can no longer afford to keep the page intact and, beginning next month, some NEXT essays will appear on daily pages instead of Sundays and a Web-site presence will continue. NEXT does not die; we'll keep printing those points of view on our daily mainstream pages.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com