"The Perception - and the Occasional Reality"
James Lileks, whose first name ought to be ReadTheWholeThing, has some sharp insight into an explosive memo written by Los Angeles Times editor james Carroll to some newsroom staffers, and later leaked. In it, the editor examines a case of liberal political bias that masqueraded as balanced news coverage, and urges his reporters and editors to do better. I can tell you from my own perspective, having worked in newsrooms loaded with liberal reporters and editors, the Carroll memo is as good an insider's view of how news coverage gets a liberal slant as you'll ever read.

Here's what Lileks had to say about it:

There's a difference between being unfair and being wrong. Copy editors every day face the issue of fighting a reporter over these matters, and in most cases they simply give in, because you can't spend all day arguing over the emanations of the shadows of the penumbras cast off by a loaded assertion or an insinuating conjuction. A writer can say that "Swedish health care is free" and copy desk might think, well, nothing's free, it's paid for by a top marginal rate of nine jillion percent, but in the sense that no one pays any lucre at the counter when they check out, yes, it's free. And so the line stands.

Any daily newspaper is a compendium of unexamined biases. I'm repeating myself here, but: it's been my experience in 20+ years that no one slants the news to achieve a particular political objective. They present what they think is the truth. Nearly everyone in the newspaper business believes they are objective. They're not shadow agents using the cloak of objectivity to cloud men's minds. But: since most people in the newspaper business have always been somewhere on the lefty side of the ledger, they don't have the same internalized set of definitions as, say, a National Review editor. (And vice versa? Sometimes - although I think you find more ex-lefties on the right than you find ex-righties on the side of the left, David Brock notwithstanding.) Terms that make a conservative's hackles prong up and quiver don't bother a reporter who's been a lib all his life. They don’t see what they don’t see.

Media bias is not a plot. It is not a grand scheme. It is simply what you get when the news is packaged by people who do not understand the opposition's mindset on a molecular level.

If I were king of the forest, I wouldn't return to the era of partisan papers - I'd just make sure that every paper had a lapsed liberal and a lapsed conservative in the higher echelons of the newsroom. Someone who may disagree with the ideals of their Flaming Youth, but remembers what they were and why they held them.