Alexander Stephens writes:

I enjoyed your posting about the political makeup of the NY Times editors and officials. One thing to ponder might be why they are registered with a party at all? Time was that at least for the sake of objectivity, journalists would register as unaffiliated with any party.

That’s a good point. In the past, journalists hid their political leanings from the world by registering to vote without declaring a party affiliation. Some journalists discovered the benefit of doing this relatively recently.

Until sometime before the 2004 election, Katie Couric—who in conservative circles is perceived as being rather liberal—was a registered Democrat. But according to the New York City Board of Elections, she has since changed her party affiliation to “blank” (which in New York State parlance means unaffiliated; the same as “independent” elsewhere). Perhaps she became frustrated with the Democratic party, or perhaps she grew weary of being labeled a partisan journalist.

I think it’s a good thing that we’re able to discover so much about the people who package the news for us. Knowing the personal political leanings of the producers of the news helps us become smarter consumers of the news. When members of the media withhold that information from us, there withholding an important part of the story. Because as much as we’d like to think otherwise, we all view the world with our own biases, and those biases will inevitably color the way we present our view of the world to others.

Rather than pretending bias doesn’t exist—which is what the old-world journalistic notion of “objectivity” does—bias should be considered a built-in flaw of an imperfect system. And if each of us, as news consumers, is aware of the flaws in the system, we can account for them when evaluating what we’re told by the media.

Only journalists who don’t want you to know the full story will try to hide their beliefs from you. The honest ones will expose their biases to the world and let the public make informed evaluations of their work.