Wordsmith

We’ll come back to this subject often. Bias is a tough word in our business. To many of our readers — especially in the “red states,” the national media often seems to show a politically liberal bias. Web sites such as newsbusters.org have made a pretty good living off of pointing out the national media’s flaws when it comes to showing that bias.

Even former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg admits to a great amount of de facto bias in the national media. In his excellent book, Bias, Goldberg gives a great deal of anecdotal evidence that the national media is very much pro-liberal and anti-conservative.

Interestingly, smaller papers have less of an issue with “liberal bias.” In fact, they may be biased toward the conservative side, depending upon the political makeup of their communities. A newspaper in the rural South, for instance, is going to have a much more conservative view than, say, the Washington Post. We’ll leave the relative journalistic merits of those two papers out of the equation for now. Heh.

But I’d stipulate this: It’s not a bad thing for a journalist to be liberal in his or her thinking. The cliche’ is that we’re supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Journalists are supposed to ask the questions that no one may want to answer. Conservatives aren’t known for questioning authority. Who is more likely to question an elected official? Who’s more likely to disbelieve the “official” line?

The liberal media, of course. But where the press must be most careful is that we must not let that bias affect our reportage. All too often we give short shrift to the conservative viewpoint. And in some cases it seems … personal. The press should NOT tell our readers what to think. We should present information — as objectively as possible — and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.