The real problem with media bias

Back in my earliest of early days at The Cavalier Daily, I complained to the folks in the News section that their stories seemed stilted and mechanical. Every paragraph was either a quote or a factual assertion that included "____ said" or "according to documents" or something similar. But I was young and naive and didn't realize what should have been obvious -- those stories needed to attribute the statements or assertions because otherwise they would merely be the reporter's own opinion, a true no-no for a news story. And those quotes or paraphrased quotes had to be accurate.

So basically, I learned lessons one and two of news reporting early on -- keep your opinions out of it and be accurate. The problem is that the mainstream media, from the WaPo and NY Times to Newsweek and Time and numerous small papers in between, do neither. The most obvious recent failure of objectivity is the pre-skewed story -- such as the Knight-Ridder reporters' inaccurate and context-free reviews of Alito decisions during his tenure on the Third Circuit. The most common failure is the Iraq as quagmire motif in the press, when it's anything but. Just take this most recent example of how the press spins a story about the lowest desertion rate in the armed forces in five years.

So this is a frustrating situation -- I don't trust the mainstream media and I read between the lines like a 1977 Russian scanning the pages of Izvestia. The Opinionated Bastard (actual parentage situation not known by Monk) had this:

I want to be able to read the New York Times or watch CNN, or listen to NPR and be able to trust what they're telling me. Since I can't do that, since the media is no longer fulfilling their basic function, I have to blog, and I have to read blogs. It pisses me off, because I had better things to do this decade than be my own news service. I don't like having to read transcripts of press conferences because I can't trust the media to even write down what was said correctly. I don't like having to spend hours finding real experts on the web to analyze how this or that media expert has distorted the facts. I don't like having to pore through the blogs of journalists, soldiers and Iraqi citizens so I can get some inkling of how things are really going, without the hype. Even though I do it, I don't even like having to download the Brookings report once/month in order to see what the numbers say about how the war is going.