People love whipping out accusations of bias on social media. Curiously, it’s frequently that we are liberal or left-leaning — which is interesting to us because we also get phone calls accusing us of conservative bias.

To us, this is a sign that we are doing things correctly. If everyone is mad at us, across the ideological spectrum, then, frankly, we are doing our jobs and telling people what they need to hear — the news — as opposed to what they want to hear.

However, with how things have been lately, we want to confess that we do, in fact, have some biases.

For one, we are biased towards believing that our veterans are American heroes, who give up their health, their time and, in some cases, their futures to keep us safe and defend our ideals abroad.

In yesterday’s paper, we ran a story from the Arizona Mirror — a member of the States Newsroom, and a sibling outlet to the Penn Capital-Star. These news outlets are nonpartisan and nonprofit.

The story in question is about how the Pentagon, using President Trump’s anti-DEI executive order as backing, has been deleting stories and information about, for example, the Navajo Code Talkers and Ira Hayes — one of the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima — from the U.S. Dept. of Defense’s website.

Supposedly, these honest-to-God American heroes are only remembered because they are “DEI.”

If this is a mistake due to fast-paced changes, then certainly we hope it will be rectified as soon as possible — but if this was intentional, let us speak plainly:

This is vile. We do not care what your party affiliation is. We do not care what your ideological background is.

If you want to try to defend this, our inbox is open and we would love to publish your thoughts on the subject as a Letter to the Editor, because, call us short-sighted or naive, we cannot come up with a valid reason to expunge mentions of these veterans from our official histories.

These people are veterans, and as such, the stories of their service should be maintained and preserved to inspire future generations. Whether they were Native American, Black, Asian or any other ethnicity or minority is secondary compared to the legacy of their honor, and to see this history targeted solely on these merits is a travesty to their memory and a loss to our nation.

We are also biased towards our own coverage area, and that means publishing content that affects our readership.

On Tuesday, we published another story from that network, in this case the Penn Capital-Star: “Trump’s cuts to federal workers have taken their toll on Pa.”

Did we publish this story because we wanted to bad-mouth Trump? Did we publish this story because we wanted to be a left-wing propaganda machine? If you looked at the comments under this story on our Facebook page, you might think so.

No.

We published this story because it showcases the direct effect of a series of decisions in Washington, D.C., on people in our coverage area.

We feel the data in that story is important to understand. For example, the story shows breakdowns of federal workers by county. Locally, there are 88 federal workers in Clinton County, or 0.69% of the workforce; 321 federal workers in Centre County, or 0.46% of the workforce; and 160 federal workers in Lycoming County, or 0.32% of the workforce. To the southeast, Union County has 1,220 federal workers, or 6.83% of the workforce — the highest amount by percentage across the state.

Our coverage area touches each of those regions.

It is likely that some of those people, their family members, or their friends, are subscribers.

Certainly, people who benefit from their employment in the region are subscribers: the continued employment status of these workers affects local shops, eateries and tax bases — among many other impacts.

So yes, we have some biases. We think that veterans should be honored, and we think that subscribers should be able to read about matters that concern them.

That said: we make no professional judgments about the decisions made in the content we publish. The only opinions the staff of this newspaper air publicly in newsprint are those which reside in these Our View editorials.

Trump and his administration are absolutely allowed to pursue his agenda, which, in the case of this story, is to cut federal employees from the workforce.

We simply report on that agenda, and highlight the effects that agenda will have, regardless of whether it is perceived as positive or negative. If hearing about that agenda makes you upset, that is your values at play, not ours.