Michael Barone comments on media bias in The Washington Times:

Let’s say you were part of a group designing the news media from scratch. Someone says that it would be a good idea to have competing news media — daily newspapers and weekly magazines, radio and television news programs. Sounds like a good start.

Someone else says that it would be a good idea to staff these news media with people who are literate and well-educated. Check. Then someone says let’s have 90 percent of the people who work for these organizations be from one of the nation’s two competitive political parties and 10 percent from the other.

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Surveys galore have shown that somewhere around 90 percent of the writers, editors and other personnel in the news media are Democrats and only about 10 percent are Republicans. We depend on the news media for information about government and politics, foreign affairs and war, public policy and demographic trends — for a picture of the world around us. But the news comes from people 90 percent of whom are on one side of the political divide. Doesn’t sound like an ideal situation.

Of course, a lot of people in the news business say it doesn’t make any difference. I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.

“Doesn’t the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no,” he said. “Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don’t affect the news.”

“So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans.”

He quickly replied, “No, then it would be biased.”

This is a variation on the same logic I often hear applied to Fox News. I’ve spoken with a number of people—left-of-center folks, as far as I can tell—who cite Fox News as an example of a biased media outlet. It’s as if media bias was invented by Fox News and never existed prior to the network coming on the scene in the mid-1990s.

To me, Fox does seem to lean more to the right than other news networks, but not significantly so. And much of that slant comes from the fact that Fox covers conservative perspectives that are often ignored by other networks. Does that make Fox lean to the right, or does it make the other networks lean to the left? Probably a little of both.

But bias is inevitable in any system managed by humans as opposed to machines. It’s just much easier for people to recognize bias when it differs from their own individual preferences.

Bias is a flaw (or feature?) of human nature, and our news media should be constructed to account for it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. The notion that reporting can always or even frequently be purely objective is a sham.

Reporters claim to be in the business of truth. If they want news consumers to believe them, they can start by acknowledging their own perspectives and the possibility that those perspectives color their perceptions—and therefore their reporting—of the world they cover.