Policy Corner: Everything you wanted to know about candidate mug shots

They are tiny - just an inch tall - but they are powerful.

I'm talking about mug shots, of course.

During political season, the content of those mug shots (head-and-shoulders mini-portraits) is very important. Their content could make you feel a certain way about a candidate, or they could color your view about our intentions as journalists, so we take great pains to ensure we are fair in their use.

We make sure they are expression neutral. Or if we show Vice President Joe Biden smiling, we show President Donald Trump smiling.

We don't want to show one frowning and one yucking it up - no matter what the content of the story is.

Of course, in presidential contests, there are myriad opportunities to get different looks. These are some of the most photographed people in the world, after all.

When we get into state and local elections, however, we have fewer photos from which to choose.

As we reach out to the candidates, we build what we call "combo mugs" - one photo file that contains the mugs of the various candidates in a given race. We post those combo mugs with stories.

Sure, doing it that way saves us time, but it also ensures that the photos we've chosen offer a fair representation of what those candidates look like, without the possibility of one photo be unflattering.

In some down-ballot races, we might have to settle for a black-and-white photo or a poorly-shot photo of one candidate while the others provide us with studio shots. But we always strive to be fair.

When we run a story that involves one candidate, we'll always seek comment from the opponent(s). And that means in those cases we also run the other mug shots, too.

Lastly, you might wonder why we run Candidate X before Candidate Y on every story.

That's just the luck of the draw. We run them all alphabetically.