How dare you question my patriotism, I mean personal bias!

I few weeks back I was having a conversation with a liberal friend of mine and he had the audacity to say that liberal bias in the media was in fact a myth. His main points were that media operations are owned by republican controlled big business interests and that they only report on what is interesting to the public. Naively, he that thought that despite the fact that about 90% of journalists vote democrat, their personal views don't get in the way of their reporting.

Unfortunately, this type of mentality pervades the thinking of the White House press corps. The belief that one can be so honest, straight, or "fair and balanced" on their own to eliminate any skewered reporting has been proven untenable time and time again. In reality, journalist and journalism students should be taught that 1) as humans, they are subject to bias, 2) that since it is inevitable that they have bias, it serves no rational purpose to deny that they have any bias, and finally 3) that even if there are layers of editors and reviewers which seek to eliminat bias, such measures will only prove fruitful if the reviewers have a different, opposite bias. (if there is just a room full of Kool-aid drinking libs trying to be objective on stories, you end up with Bush national guard fiascos).

Hugh Hewitt demonstrated this perfectly on his radio show the other night, where he interviewed Helen "I'll die if Cheney becomes President" Thomas. The full transctript is here, along with audio. Helen gets so upset that Hugh is asking her about her personal biases and whether it affects her reporting she actually hangs up on him.