The author talks about only one non-"liberal" abuse, namely the liberally-biased presentation of the rest of the news.

But in the age of big government, isn't there more and more of another very obvious kind of muck to rake? It isn't only capitalists who now do bad things.

There are surely now a growing number of journalists who want to have an impact on society by encouraging more capitalism, rather than less.

Again, perfectly natural.

As Slip Mahoney of the Bowery Boys would have put it: "We resemble that remark!"

"The problem with conservatives, at least with those conservatives that rail the liberalism in today's journalism, is that they see it as a personal attack on their values, a vast arraying of forces against them"

Eric Burns is obviously not a conservative, then.

News Corporation media, on the other hand, are free from that sort of bias. They have an alarming tendency to suck up to whoever is in government, wherever they happen to be. (Unless the current government is riding for a fall, in which case they are busy sucking up to the next government.)

It is presumably because governments in most places regulate the media, and such a big group is vulnerable to getting on the wrong side of the regulators. But I find dressing up a commercial strategy in high principle as they do just a bit hard to take.

The media have always been biased, and wholeheartedly so, as any intro course on newspaper history would show. The media scene used to accomodate any number of daily papers in different languages, political viewpoints, etc.

When nation-wide radio, and then television, and then newspapers came to the local market and corner newsstand, the claim was made that these media outlets would be objective, so as to distance themselves from the more partisan local papers and broadcasts.

This assertion of objectivity has become so ingrained into journalism that it is now accepted as an article of faith by those inside the profession, even though any dispassionate high school student can easily pick out the various biases. When I was in college, lo these many years ago, we all knew that Time and Newsweek were generally liberal, US News was generally more conservative, and other journals went their vaious ways.

It is not difficult to see the political slant in any modern newspaper or TV news show, and anyone who believes that they are objective deserves to be that misinformed. The hypocrisy is in the phony claim of objectivity, which is humanly impossible, and has been debunked numerous times by media insiders and observers.

The current fuss is based on misperceptions on both sides. The media types keep proclaiming their neutrality, when their agenda (whether from the right or left) is practically tatooed on their foreheads, and the critics keep demanding the objectivity that was promised, even though such a thing is impossible.

Rather than these heated arguments about whose biased and for what, it would serve us all better to ask some pointed questions about specific news items and how it was decided to handle them. The recent blow out at the NYT demonstrates that the media need informed watchdogs every bit as much as any other structural element of the society, and maybe more than most.

The rise of the blogosphere offers a marvelous opportunity for interested citizens to both enlarge their news sources, and monitor the performance of the mainstream media as well. It is, in its own way, a return to the time when New York had dozens of daily papers telling the news from a hundred viewpoints and many languages, except now on an international scale.

Walter Cronkite? Blimey, is he still alive?

He must be the only living newscaster to be immortalised in a Bob Dylan song. Unless, of course, you know differently....

Bonus points: what song, and on what album?