Facts are not only boring, they are almost meaningless, by themselves. Thus, the “big truth” is the story that the facts support.

Balance would be to have two short, biased stories on the same facts — with an inside / hyperlinked boring encyclopedia fact listing.

Think Mark Twain. Unbiased observer? Not hardly. But a hell of a good read, as a general rule. Ditto Mencken.

The pretense of objective newsies is insulting.

There are two sides to bias, what you put in and what you leave out.

It is easier to deal with a specific report / article / story than with the corporation as a whole. But, obviously, this applies at both levels.

The thing I find most disgusting is that there is no honor shown by reporters. There is an honorable way to report the news whether you are biased or not.

The honorable way is to include all facts and verify that they ARE facts. I have seen too many stories where “facts” and “figures” are quoted that are palbable falsities. 1,000 is not 100,000 no matter how much you want it to be. Saying that a situation is TWICE as bad may be true or false (see health reporting). Saying that the odds went from .001 to .002 is a necessary fact, too. But without that part of the “fact” the reader won’t be able to tell if the odds really changed significantly.

Additionally there are the unsourced comments. Who says something is just as important as what was said. That’s the only way a consumer would have the faintest chance of determining the bias or import of the source. This is also a gray area because many of the “sources” are the reporters themselves (see Paleo stringers).

Honesty and honor would go a long way to solving the problem of bias.

Voila! Unbiased journalism.

Roger — I am highly confident that this would work. You should put it together on Pajamas. I’ll be one of the conservatives.

I think is possible for the writer to try to balance the two withing a story. But the analysis should be held to a minimum, and always should be buttressed by the facts.

While it may not be possible to write completely bias free, the writer could try.

Rupert Murdoch’s comment that he thought some Wall Street Journal columns were too long doesn’t help.

First, it used to be that the objective of reporting was to relate *facts*. Of course you can still inject a lot of bias just with “facts”, by omitting some and overemphasizing others. Nevertheless if the goal is to report facts, you might actually get some facts. Nowadays the goal is to tell a “narrative”. You can tell this even when the story is not ideologically charged. News articles used to start off, “such and such happened yesterday”, or “The President announced …” etc. Now nearly every story starts with a tear-jerky anecdote about some otherwise completely non-newsworthy individual. The saying “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” is now the operating imperative for most news organizations.

The other factor that used to balance off reporter liberalism was the fact that most publishers were conservative Republicans. They were self-made men and strong believers in capitalism and free enterprise. The LA Times, Chi Tribune and NY Daily News used to be very Republican and right-wing. Now the newspapers are run by their scions, effete dilletantes who have never had to work an honest day in their life, have had everything handed to them and are therefore consumed by leftist guilt. Case in point: Pinch Sulzberger (though the NY Times admittedly was leftist even in the old days).

Well, I am one of those people. I notice that you haven’t made the least effort to inquire why we should have that opinion.

Look at my last sentence. Now consider: NPR does not make the least effort to inquire into a great number of items, situations, circumstances, procedures and trends, all of which are damned important to the opinions on our side of the fence.

And those gaping exclusions are just the reason we might rail against the cozy self-satisfied entity called NPR.

Its sound production is superb – more than likely, a large part of the taxpayer funding it has enjoyed went into the top-of-the-line audio gear and networking equipment used to convey its precious pronouncements to the urban sophisticates who dwell on every word.

Please enjoy your membership in that equaler-than-others club, but when you’re not too busy, consider that there are a lot of us out here with the audacity to hold diverse opinions – and that NPR is the last organization in the country to ever consider producing, on an equal-time basis, news and ‘information’ that would make us think that we were included in the ‘National’ portion of public radio.

Excellent question. I think objectivity is something to aspire to but that can never be totally achieved. The aspiration is important, though, because it asks us to continuously check and recheck ourselves as well as our assumptions. It makes us look at our own work from different perspectives. I feel the most unbiased reporting I tend to get is from NPR, although there are people who would rail against NPR as a tool of the left.

What’s been most shocking to me is the rather bald-faced manner in which most of the MSM is abandoning even the aspiration to objectivity. This is especially true when it comes to photo choice. There was one egregious example on latimes.com a few months back: Obama was pictured giving a speech, his head cocked slightly to one side, his finger pointing upwards. I believe it was at the Biltmore downtown. Overhead, there was an enormous light fixture with a circular feature hanging down, out of which came the lights. The photographer positioned the fixture around Obama’s head so that it framed it and looked like a combination halo/crown of thorns. It made me ill. It would have been one thing had the article been about the deification of Obama by his followers. But it was your standard, everyday “Obama gives a speech in downtown L.A.” article.

When the Los Angeles Times starts borrowing from religious iconography to make a political candidate look saintly, we have to ask ourselves how the more subtle and less transparent choices they make influence our view of the candidates.

I grabbed another great example off the web in September. This was about the time the media decided they’d start telling their “breakdown of the Clinton machine vs. the Obama phenom” story.

Over His Shoulder