MICHAEL KINSLEY’S new media bias piece strikes me as basically on-target in the typical blah Kinsley kind of way. What I’m more interested in, though, is the conservative bias of television commentary. How frequently have you seen a news anchor interviewing some other journalists for a little opinion and insight. Invariably (if the subject is political) they’ll bring a conservative commentator (say, Tucker Carlson) to give a right-wing view. And who do they find to give the liberal p.o.v.? Typically a “straight” journalist for an apolitical publication (say, Margaret Carlson).

Even if we accept that mainstream journalists like Margaret are liberals, as journalists who wish to appear non-biased (which would be pointless in a Weekly Standard columnist) they have significant constraints placed on them. Consider also the difference in worldview between a person who happens to hold a certain political position and a person who is a professional advocate for that position. No matter how liberal Margaret Carlson may be, she has no reason to spout the Democratic party line when (as the lines of political parties often are) it’s a disingenuous one. Tucker, however, is part of the line-spouting process.

That creates a real and disturbing bias.

posted by Matthew at 1/11/2002 12:03:00 AM

Atrios moved from the blogger.com domain to his own eschatonblog.com, but the backend is still blogger. I believe this is because his post volume was so large that it broke their migration system when they moved the blogger application fully into the google cloud.