The day after President Barack Obama announced the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, The Miami Herald ran a front page profile of her by Michael Doyle from McClatchy Newspapers' Washington bureau.

''Her decisions over nearly 17 years as a federal judge define her as an unabashed liberal,'' wrote Doyle. His strong statement was then picked up and repeated in much of the early Republican criticism of Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican and federal appeals court judge in New York.

The only problem with the statement is that it is wrong, and Doyle says he realized it within hours of filing the story. But the reporting in The Herald in the days since the announcement has not corrected the impressions left by that first page-one story.

To be sure, there has been very lively debate on Sotomayor among the news and op-ed columnists. Readers who once complained of a lack of conservative voices in the newspaper have no reason to complain now. Three columnists -- Jackie Bueno Sosa, Glenn Garvin and George Will -- wrote critical or skeptical columns of Sotomayor, against favorable ones by Leonard Pitts, Dick Polman, Ellen Goodman and The Herald's own unsigned editorial.

But the news stories are the final authoritative source for readers, and you would be excused if you have come away from the coverage with a skewed view of the Supreme Court nominee as a liberal judicial activist.

Republican warriors such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, have backed away from their earlier, often harsh, even vicious estimations of Judge Sotomayor.

As Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and a source for much of the ammunition used by Republicans in their judicial battles, wrote: While I would have liked to see a more conservative libertarian type on the high court, President Obama's selection of . . . Sotomayor was a very prudent and wise decision from a far left liberal like Obama. . . . Sotomayor has previously pledged to follow the Constitution, and not legislate from the bench, and her career as a federal court judge suggests, as a whole, that this is the way she will administer to the law.''

Yet, as late as Wednesday, a Washington story by McClatchy's David Lightman put a possible grudging acceptance of her by Republican senators as something they were being forced to swallow. It wasn't until the end of the story that the Republican senator who counts most, Jeff Sessions, minority leader on the Judiciary Committee and a staunch Alabama conservative, is quoted as saying: I'm very impressed with her knowledge, her experience, her energy level. It was a delight to talk with her.''

It was a political story, and there was nothing wrong with it as such. What Herald readers haven't seen is the host of articles written by Doyle that dissect her judicial record. The articles have delved deep into her police, environmental, abortion and other rulings, and what he has found, he said, is that she is ``pretty much in the middle.''

Doyle wrote his first profile on deadline with limited information. Mistakes or missed nuances are understandable in trying to come up with a next-day analysis of something so complicated as a judge's body of work. I have made them myself.

By the time he appeared on a C-Span show that night, however, he had changed his mind, and said so on the air. He was surprised that his statement -- ''unabashed liberal'' -- had taken on a life of its own by then and was being bandied about in the debate. He regrets not filing a correction that night, which he should have done.

Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal defends The Herald's coverage. He said he felt that the many columns helped readers flush out Sotomayor's positions. He noted the sympathetic stories about her, such as an interview with her mother outside her retirement home in Margate, in Broward County.

More important, Gyllenhaal said that there was much more coverage to come in what is just now the beginning of a confirmation process that may last months. ''We are at the very beginning of the coverage of this story,'' he said.

The coverage of her judicial record is important. There has been and will be a lot of smoke and fire over the coming months over identity politics, isolated statements she has made on being a Latina, and on her temperament. Much of it will be mere political posturing. It is her rulings from the appeals court bench that tell us just what kind of judge she is, and most likely will be. And a judge, in the end, is what we are selecting.

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