Democrats claim they are investigated by the paper's bloodhounds with a zeal unknown to any Republican in the state. Editors and reporters say that's a tired, baseless charge, point to a few Republicans they've skewered, and suggest that since Oklahoma has historically been dominated by Democrats, they would logically get more scrutiny.

Persecution would be a more accurate word, says former Democratic Governor David Walters, who was the target of relentlessly critical coverage by the newspaper from 1991 to 1994, coverage one Oklahoman reporter describes as "a lot of smoke and not much fire." In 1993, two Oklahoman reporters went to the floor of the state-run hospital where Walters's seventy-three-year-old mother was being treated for terminal pancreatic cancer and asked nurses if she had been given preferential treatment. She hadn't, but the newspaper defended its actions.

Vindictive former Walters aides always found a receptive ear at the Oklahoman, which based stories in 1991 on the word of a fired state tourism director who "found" Walters's personal checkbook, photocopied the contents, and showed them to the FBI and reporters. Reporter Robby Trammell's story began: "The FBI has been told that David Walters' personal checkbook contained several deposits labeled ‘bonus' that may have been illegal cash contributions to his successful gubernatorial campaign, the Oklahoman has learned."

FBI has been told? May have been illegal? The FBI dropped its investigation after seven months, finding nothing to warrant charges. The newspaper justifies its treatment of Walters by pointing out that he later pleaded guilty to a minor violation of campaign contribution limits.

The Oklahoman has an entirely different standard for covering the current Republican governor, Frank Keating. His misuse of a state plane and appointment of big contributors to state posts, while reluctantly noted, have hardly nudged the paper's outrage meter. Says assistant managing editor Mike Shannon: "We don't have any evidence of anything to go after Keating on. Basically we think the guy is pretty clean."

"I think the Oklahoman is precluded from delving into certain areas they believe the publisher would not want them to look into," says Andy Rieger, managing editor of The Norman Transcript and former section editor at the Oklahoman. "I don't think they take a critical look at Governor Keating."

An explanation might be found in Keating's 1998 campaign contribution records: the governor received $5,000 -- the most allowed by Oklahoma law -- from Mr. and Mrs. Edward L. Gaylord.

The Oklahoman's bias transcends mere party politics. A local reaction story last year about the defeat of a minimum wage bill before Congress typically quoted Oklahoma business interests saying the bill's demise was great news. But it found no room for unions, workers, or social agencies that might disagree. Such an omission is hardly surprising for a newspaper that in recent editorials has associated unions with "brutality, selfishness, fraud, corruption, and intimidation," called Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich the "socialist-in-charge at the U.S. Labor Department," and titled another screed that called for his firing Robert Reich's Amerika.

And despite some fine reporting last year on pollution from corporate hog farms, the Oklahoman is nearly alone among major papers in not having a full-time environmental reporter. "They'll cover [a congressman's] speech when he rips the EPA," says Sierra Club legislative coordinator Mark Derichsweiler. "But the Tulsa World is always more fair and evenhanded."

Sometimes the paper's cranky bias is simply bizarre, like when it placed a thirty-column-inch story last September headlined Health Stores Hard to Swallow immediately under its front page banner. The article, written by an education writer, focused on a small-town Oklahoma college professor who says the use of herbs, vitamins, and dietary supplements, or homeopathic medicine, is "pure quackery," yet the story never established his credibility in medical, legal, or education circles or even gave a hint -- a new book? a recent speech? -- as to why his opinions suddenly dominated the front page.

Other Oklahoman stories are equally out of place in a good newspaper, but at least their reason for being is transparent. The Oklahoman's online search engine shows that in the last four years the paper has run some forty articles mentioning a development north of town it describes as "the city's most prestigious gated community." When its golf course opened last July, there was a story and photos. Ditto for the first residents moving in, the naming of new officers in the development firm, and several other non-stories. The name of this new upscale retreat? Gaillardia, owned by OPUBCO Development, whose president is E.K. Gaylord II, the publisher's son.

But the Oklahoman's news pages are an intellectual oasis of free thought compared with its editorial page.

Patrick McGuigan, head of the Oklahoman's five-person editorial board, which added its first female only in August, had no newspaper background when he was hired in 1990. He was a well-known conservative activist in Washington who fought against the Supreme Court nomination of David Souter (too moderate) and for his friends Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork. More ideologue than editor, McGuigan, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told journalist James Risser in the June 1998 American Journalism Review: "We're trying to change the political culture; we're trying to make Oklahoma a conservative bastion."

Some might argue that McGuigan's goal has already been met -- all eight members of Oklahoma's congressional delegation received 100 percent ratings from the Christian Coalition -- but he's leaving little to chance. McGuigan force-feeds his readers a constant right-wing lineup of columnists such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Joseph Sobran, Cal Thomas, Mona Charen, Jeff Jacoby, Thomas Sowell, Linda Bowles, and Tony Snow. No liberal columnists, zero, none, are regularly featured.

Want some solid impartial research with your editorials? Sorry, about the only "research" you'll find here comes filtered through the anti-regulation, anti-labor, anti-abortion zealotry of the Family Research Council, Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, American Family Association, The Washington Times, Moral Majority, and the Free Congress Foundation. Critics could tolerate the extremism, they say, if McGuigan simply allowed articulate opponents the same amount of space that, say, Cal Thomas got for did liberalism produce unabomber? Typically, dissenters are confined to the letters to the editor ghetto, where they vie for space with punish all adulterers! and good-bye to socialists.

Not surprisingly, Clinton's self-destruction unleashed McGuigan at his finest. In October alone he ran fifty-seven anti-Clinton editorials or opinion pieces, often three or more on the same page. But he was in rare form on September 24, when all five op-ed pieces (one titled "A Nation's Disgrace," another, "Clinton's Disgrace"), plus an editorial cartoon, bashed Clinton. The Oklahoman called for Clinton's resignation in January 1998 -- that's right, January.

part 1: The Worst Newspaper in America
part 2: By design or neglect
part 3: But Oklahoma City isn't
part 4: Democrats claim
part 5: ...sucking intelligence from its readers

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