Near the top of Jacquielynn Floyd's July 4 Metro column, she included this paragraph:

In ordinary years, patriotism – amor patriae, "love of country" – is a kind of dusty holiday decoration that gets pulled out of the attic and displayed on the porch for the Fourth of July. It's a topic for kids' essay contests or the old codgers down at the VFW, not something you talk much about around the office. It's kinda personal, kinda uncool.

Some veterans of foreign wars deeply resented that passage. "If your article…were presented to a military tribunal your fate would, probably, be the firing squad," said Marty Nell, commander of VFW Post 4380 in Plano. "You should know that this rebuttal is coming from a group of ‘old VFW codgers' who through their dedication and sacrifice to this great country have given you the freedom to write such trash…"

Hold your fire, guys. Jack didn't mean to offend real patriots, or to impugn any veteran's patriotism. As many skillful writers sometimes do, she built a fake and exaggerated reality at the start, so that her final point about the real meaning of patriotism would pack more punch. The device is so commonly used that there's a technical word for it: The straw-man rhetorical technique.

Ms. Floyd created a straw man at the start of her column with incredibly shallow feelings of patriotism. She describes a person who thinks little of patriotism most of the time, and perhaps even looks down on the old guys at the VFW who, in the straw man's opinion, are decidedly un-cool because they take patriotism so seriously. The cool folks, according to her straw man, don't really care much for such things – except for this year, when election season has made patriotism something everyone wants to talk about, "like werewolves baying beneath the full moon."

The straw man is, of course, all too many of us. And that may be why some people misread the column. Some thought Jack was saying she regarded the combat veterans as "codgers," which is to say, amusingly eccentric old men. In fact, she wasn't criticizing patriotic veterans. She was criticizing the people who look down on them.

I know for a fact that Jack's got nothing but the highest regard for combat veterans. Her youngest brother is an active-duty Army Ranger who won a Purple Heart last year after being shot in the hand. After having his trigger finger amputated, he asked to be re-trained for combat and returned to his unit.

Alas, people judge us not by what we think but by what we write. So many people seem to have missed Jack's point that I'd say her writing in this particular column was just a tad too subtle. Perhaps we need to take greater pains to signal when we're creating straw men – particularly when we're writing about veterans on Independence Day.

Fran Walden sends along a story about Stephen Payne's alleged efforts to sell access to Bush Administration officials in return for donations to the Bush library and asks, "Why doesn't the Dallas Morning News print stories that are against Bush?....The News has failed to print articles concerning the ‘sale' of time with Cheney and others for library donations. The News continues to disappoint thousands, if not millions, of citizens."

Ms. Walden, we did run the story about suspect fundraising for the Bush Library. But we may not have run it where you were looking for it, which is to say, in our A section. We ran it at the top of our Metro page because, to us, the library is a local story, and we wrote it through our local staff. Our Washington Bureau quickly followed up with a story about how President Bush's folks were no longer accepting foreign donations.

We're focusing more on local news now than we used to, because that's where we think we can make the biggest contributions to our readers' lives. But we're also devoting great effort to covering as many of the major national and world developments as we can. We try to make sure that anyone who reads our paper will see the major headlines and get the gist of the day's main world and national news.

Charlie Lugo writes, "I will be canceling my subscription and no longer reading the DMN because of the obvious anti-President Bush slant on articles that you choose to print."

Mr. Lugo, you seem to feel as strongly about our coverage of Mr. Bush as Ms. Walden does, but in a totally opposite direction. If we could just average your political leanings out, we might have a chance to keep both of you happy. As it is, I should just note that our editors try to select stories based on their importance and their depth, not their political persuasion. We've featured front-page stories on recent successes in Iraq, for instance.

Unfortunately for all of us, President Bush has had to cope with a lot of bad news lately. We report that news. We don't endorse it. If it were up to us, gas would still be $1.50 per gallon and the housing market would be booming. But we're not in the advocacy business. Most of our readers pay us to bring them the straight news. We have our good moments and our bad ones, but we do try to play things down the middle. I think that most of the time we succeed.

Where we get into trouble, I believe, is when people with extremely strong political biases read news stories that contradict those biases. There's a whole school of literature in psychology that describes what happens next: Almost none of the strongly biased people say, "Whoa! Thanks for opening my mind to a whole new way of looking at reality! In future, I will lead a richer and more enlightened existence!" They're much more likely to believe, with every fiber of their being, that we're part of a vast right-wing or left-wing conspiracy. So they threaten to cancel their subscriptions unless we run more stories with which they agree.

We take all allegations of bias very seriously, and we constantly re-examine our coverage. But, for reasons the above reader notes should make clear, we can't possibly satisfy everyone. I'd ask only that readers of good faith examine the facts closely and explore our coverage over time before leaping to any conclusions about bias on our part.

A reader with the e-mail handle "robtonic" writes to accuse us of bias for giving front-page play to the story about Phil Gramm allegedly accusing Americans of becoming a nation of "whiners," while running inside the paper the story about Jesse Jackson saying he wanted to perform an indelicate operation on Barack Obama's private parts. "Together," he says, "the American left and our partners in the print and broadcast industry can change this country into a socialist, under-achieving nation and we can get rid of the evil rich and have everyone share equally in the despair and gloom."

There's a tiny germ of truth here, in that where we play a story does reflect our thoughts on its importance. The fallacy is in thinking that we play things to advance a political cause.

In this case, Mr. Jackson was, in essence, a vulgar side show. He's not an adviser to the Obama campaign. He hasn't been an important political figure in this election, and he isn't one now. His own son rebuked him. Plus, he's not a local figure. So we ran the story inside. But we didn't shy away from it. We printed Mr. Jackson's exact words, unlike many papers around the country.

Mr. Gramm, however, was among Mr. McCain's chief economic advisers. (I've seen him described as the chief adviser, but I'm not sure what that means.) He's also important in his own right. As a senator, Mr. Gramm sponsored some of the deregulatory bills that are now being debated in Washington. The fact that Mr. McCain chose him arguably says something about Mr. McCain's own economic-policy leanings. Perhaps because of that, Mr. McCain immediately disowned Mr. Gramm, threatening to send him to Minsk as ambassador to one of the world's least-appealing nations, even within the Communist bloc. And Mr. Gramm is from Texas. He's a local story, as well as a national one.

I thought the Gramm story deserved front-page play. I didn't think it deserved a headline quite as large as what we gave it, but there was a reason for that. The Gramm story, for layout purposes, had to be as tall as the iPhone photo that ran beside it. Faced with the need to fill a tall space, our layout desk used a tall headline. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't political, either.