Sometimes a label can go a long way toward ending speculation about a newspaper story's bias.

On Sunday, the Review-Journal led the paper with a huge article about Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden, written by Laura Myers.

From the headline and placement and length of the piece you'd think the paper was throwing all of its weight behind Lowden. And since she's polling slightly better than the other main GOP candidate Danny Tarkanian, perhaps they're propping her up to run against Harry Reid.

As a former political reporter at the RJ, I know how frustrating it can be when a profile piece runs absent of any labels. So, I'll give Myers a slight benefit of the doubt about Sunday's piece.

Perhaps it is one in a series of profile pieces about GOP Senate candidates. Maybe she's already working on Tarkanian and Sharron Angle. Maybe she's not even going to bother with the other seven or eight on the GOP side. Maybe another reporter has been assigned to the Reid camp, or to one of the other GOP candidates.

But we can only assume that's happening because that would make good journalistic sense.

Sunday's piece, sadly, does not because it runs without the readers knowledge of any of the other work that may be taking place.

In isolation, the Lowden piece comes off as just free media for the candidate polling indicates is currently in the best shape against Reid.

The piece should have been marked "one in a series of candidate profiles" or something to that effect. And since it wasn't, we must assume the paper's bias has gotten in the way of balanced reporting.

The RJ's history with these things gives us no reason to dispel that assumption.

But before we leave the actual profile http://www.lvrj.com/news/lowden-draws-on-experience-vision-in-senate-run-82543662.html, it's instructive to see how Myers actually did the assignment.

And there are gaping holes in it. She makes no mention, really, of the other candidates on the GOP side. Inexcusable as Lowden has to first beat them.

She doesn't really discuss long-term strategy. She doesn't really tell us what Lowden truly believes (other than the fact that Reid is bad), and she pays incredibly short shrift to Lowden's term as chair of the state GOP. 

"After a stint as the chairwoman of the state GOP, Lowden decided to jump into the Reid race when Republican pollsters last summer saw the U.S. Senate majority leader as vulnerable -- and that the former state senator could beat him. (The early polling didn't test the name of Danny Tarkanian, the former UNLV basketball star and Lowden's closest GOP primary opponent, because he wasn't yet on the Republican radar.)"

This is naive at best. Lowden's "stint" as chairwoman of the state party was frought with issues. Ask anyone in the other candidates' camps or any of the Ron Paul supporters how they feel about this. A simple line would have sufficed in the overall profile. But we get none.

And Tarkanian was a known candidate long before that first polling.

We also learn from the profile that Lowden has had a "tough" childhood (described as dental work without Novocaine); and that Lowden entered the field of journalism as a pretty waitress without a clue.

As profiles go, there's plenty more Myers could have done with this. But since we don't really have a clue what type of story she was writing or how it plays with any of her future reports, we have no idea what Myers should have done with this.

Sometimes a simple label can go a long way toward the perception of independent reporting.

**

Jane Ann Morrison is back on pace to match her impressive correction tally from last year.

She earned her first correction Saturday.

"All the money raised in a charity event mentioned in Jane Ann Morrison's column Thursday went to Congregation Ner Tamid and was not split with the Meadows School."

As a correction, it's awkwardly written. Who starts a sentence with "All the money raised." Perhaps the RJ needs a corrections editor. Goodness knows the person would have plenty of work.

At any rate, Ms. Morrison makes her first official error of 2010.