The Washington Post's Assessment of Media Bias

From La Shawn Barber

I know liberals are so tired of hearing about this subject (like the person who tracked back to this post). They think a liberal media bias is non-existent. For example, check out the way the Washington Post covers it in Bull Market for Media Bias:

We in the news business think we're impartial seekers of truth, but most Americans think otherwise. They view us as sloppy, biased and self-serving....the latest Pew survey confirms -- with lots of numbers -- an especially disturbing trend that we've all sensed: People are increasingly picking their media on the basis of partisanship. If you're Republican and conservative, you listen to talk radio and watch the Fox News Channel. If you're liberal and Democratic, you listen to National Public Radio and watch "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." It's like picking restaurants: Chinese for some, Italian for others. And everyone can punch up partisan blogs -- the fast food of the news business. What's disturbing is that, like restaurants, the news media may increasingly cater to their customers' (partisan) tastes. News slowly becomes more selective and slanted.

Can you believe this? Samuelson just doesn't get it. In his assessment, the media aren't biased; it is us who are biased toward news sources based on our "partisanship." At the same time, it's almost a confession, of sorts, that mainstream media is biased, which is why he believes we seek out partisan sources in the first place.

What Samuelson misses is that mainstream media journalists cater to each other. They may truly believe they're fair and objective, but people living outside the left-leaning enclaves of many large cities on the east coast don't enter into their thoughts except when they consort with the masses like Peter Jennings did last month.
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