From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Mike Peska in for Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, newspapers across the country reported that a federal judge had condemned the federal death penalty.

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court prohibited executions of the mentally retarded.

Writing in Slate this week, Will Salatin says such stories

are tailor-made for editorial boards and reporters already opposed to the death penalty. But he says

America's major newspapers sometimes shrink from making their case directly. Instead, he says,

they prefer to chip away at the death penalty story by story.

There's no issue on which journalists as a whole are more opposed in their general line of thinking to the public than the death penalty.

The death penalty is an issue where the public, by roughly three to one, favors it, and journalists, according to surveys, by about eight or nine to one, oppose it.

And so what you find is a noticeable from the point of view of the reader bias in the reporting and editorializing about the issue.

And that's what's come across this week.

Give me an example.

Well, there was a story in the New York Times this past Sunday about Japanese executions and how cruel it is that

Japan doesn't tell anybody when they're executing prisoners. A year ago, there were articles in the New

York Times about how cruel it was of the United States government to allow

closed circuit TV viewing of the Timothy McVeigh execution. And there has been similar

editorial criticism just about every time there has been an open execution in the United States

where a lot of people get to see it. So my conclusion from seeing the same newspapers complain both ways is that they're not

really particularly upset that the execution is secret or that the execution is public. What they're

upset about is that the executions are happening at all. If you think that many of the major newspapers in

this country are fundamentally opposed to the death penalty,

and yet they only argue on the margins rather than argue the fundamental question.

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