A little more than a week ago, we published what, at least these days, seemed like a fairly routine story on page A7: A federal appeals court had ordered banks to give congressional investigators the tax returns of the president of the United States.

Yet it wasn’t the article itself that caught my eye. It was the byline.

The story was written by Bloomberg News, a wire service owned by Michael Bloomberg. The Houston Chronicle has used it for years. Bloomberg provides valuable stories for our readers, particularly to supplement our already-significant coverage of the energy industry.

But the plot has thickened with Michael Bloomberg’s belated entry into the presidential campaign — and with Bloomberg News’ inexplicable decision that it will not cover its boss seriously. That is, it will not cover candidate Bloomberg with the same vigor with which it pursues revelations about President Donald Trump. The same soft treatment awaits other Democrats in the race: No serious journalism to come from Bloomberg News.

This made my stomach rumble during breakfast. Why would we use Bloomberg’s work involving presidential politics? I wrote a quick note to several editors in the newsroom, saying we shouldn’t publish Bloomberg News’ stories on the campaign, and that we should look closely before publishing any of the news service’s energy stories if they involve Trump administration policies. End of story.

Well, not quite. My memo found its way to The Washington Post, which published a story about such discussions in newsrooms. I hadn’t planned on taking a public stand, but after a 40-year career trying to get newsmakers to level with journalists, I wasn’t going to no-comment the Post when a reporter contacted me.

It also made me realize that this is a good moment to get back to you, our readers, on a subject of obvious interest. When I first wrote in July about our plans for the newsroom, I got scores of replies. Some of you just wanted to fix problems with your subscription, but others wanted to discuss — or vent about — pieces of our work that you perceived as biased.

Several folks wanted to discuss our editorials and op-ed columns. So I should emphasize here that I have no oversight of the Chronicle’s Opinion section. The editors there report to Publisher John McKeon, as do I, and we run separate shops. It’s a proper deal: I don’t tell them what their opinions should be, and they don’t tell me what stories we should cover.

But beyond that, some of you found bias in our selection of news stories, in the way we sometimes frame those stories, and even in the wire services we choose to provide national and international news. One reader wrote recently to the publisher: “Does the media, in fact, have a liberal left-leaning bias in their investigative reporting and in what they decide to publish and the words they opt for in those published articles?”

For most of the last two years, I was directly in charge of our investigations. It would be difficult to pin an ideological tag on that body of work.

Was it liberal or conservative when we showed that Hurricane Harvey was a disaster made not only by nature, but by man? Left- or right-leaning when we revealed that a major local transplant center had fallen far short of its reputation? What was our bias when we documented that the Houston region is the most dangerous major city in the country for drivers and pedestrians?

Did we have an agenda when we took on sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches, or poor management of the nation’s largest education endowment? You bet we did: We thought it was important to show where things had gone wrong, and how they could be made right.

I recognize that bias can seep into all parts of our work. Every day, our 200-plus journalists try to help our community make sense of this city, region and state, covering stories on topics that can inflame the passion of readers — guns, abortion, immigration, climate science. They write and edit dozens of stories daily for houstonchronicle.com and our print edition.

Sometimes, I find fault with a story. It could be the way it was framed from the start, the questions we asked, the questions we didn’t ask. It could be the people we failed to talk with and the viewpoint they could have represented.

But all of us work very hard to weed out the work that doesn’t measure up, or to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again. The vast majority of the journalists I’ve known at five news organizations were able to set aside their personal thoughts while doing their work. A reporter or editor with a personal political agenda doesn’t last very long.

That includes the editors who choose our wire stories. Some readers who wrote to me this summer judged us harshly simply because we published stories from The New York Times or the Post. Using stories from those publications gives our paper a richer blend of news; both have largely distinguished themselves with probing reporting nationally and internationally, with stories aimed both at the president and his Democratic opponents. Most recently, the Post scored with the searing story that our leaders — from both parties — had for more than a decade misrepresented the status of the war in Afghanistan.

The key is that they, and we, often publish probing stories about the folks who are in charge, or who want to be in charge. Journalists should not choose targets based on their political affiliation. That’s why we won’t be publishing Bloomberg News’ work on the presidential campaign.

steve.riley@chron.com

twitter: @srileychronicle