Even third-party candidates welcome here

On Monday, we got a visit from a group of students at Academy Charter School. They are studying journalism and were here to tour our operation.

As the tour wrapped up, the kids wanted to know what stories their tour guide, our assistant managing editor, was working on.

One of them — a profile of Care Clift, Libertarian candidate for governor — prompted a follow-up question from a student who perceived correctly that the story would feature just one candidate from a field of at least four seeking that office.

“Isn’t that biased?” he asked.

It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot at this time of year, as candidates are barnstorming through various newspapers in the state, making their pitches to editorial boards.

We had a similar meeting Wednesday with Sean Parnell, the incumbent in the gubernatorial race. Our meeting with him produced a story you’ll find in today’s paper. We’ve done that for everyone from Joe Miller to Mark Begich to Bob Bird, when he ran as the Alaskan Independence Party candidate for U.S. Senate in 2008.

So what was our answer to that young man innocently asking a question in our pressroom at the end of his class tour?

“You don’t always have to balance out a story within a single story. Sometimes you can do a balanced account over a series of stories,” we told him.

And that’s why we sit down with Gov. Parnell and why we’ve extended the same courtesy previously to Bill Walker and his then-running mate Craig Fleener.

It’s also why we met with Clift and are scheduled to do a phone interview with the Alaska Constitution Party Candidate, J.R. Meyers, on Tuesday.

There are some who might wonder why we bother to include Clift and Meyers. The thinking goes that candidates making independent or third-party runs don’t have much chance of winning, so we should spend our time focusing on those who do.

It can be frustrating for those candidates. Indeed, part of our conversation with Clift included a discussion of her fight to get included in more debates.

We talk to these candidates because we don’t believe it is our job to pick winners before the voters have had their say. We also understand that we live in a state where more than 60 percent of registered voters are not aligned with either of the two major parties. So it does not make sense to us that elections be framed in the limited context of what works best for those two parties.

Maybe our ideas of fairness and our attempts at objectivity are anachronisms in this age of Internet news, but we don’t think so.

And even if they don’t have a strong chance of winning, we think third-party candidates have a role to play. They promote a robust discussion of the ideas.

Clift is saying a lot of things about fiscal responsibility we haven’t heard other people say. Our experience with the Alaska Constitution Party leads us to believe they’re a party full of ideas as well.

So we’ll continue to talk to the Clifts and the Meyerses, the Bob Birds and the rest of them. And we hope you’ll hear them out. It’s well worth your time.