Customers tell us we are biased, obsessed with trivial issues, to politicized, to focused on trying to lecture and shape public opinion, and to monolithic to represent a variety of opinions intelligently. After taking an internal anonymous survey, we have decided the customers are obviously misinformed dolts. Exactly how hard is it to scientifically and systematically quantify what it is that people want and then deliver it to them? If this wasn’t so painful to watch it would make a great comedy skit.

When businesses consistently shrink, rarely do they blame the customer for their failure to appreciate what a great product they are rejecting. They also rarely outright reject the remaining customer’s feedback on how to fix the sinking ship. Arrogance, insulated group think, the fish that can’t identify the water because it breathes it daily, seem to still be in place even at this point in time.

Exactly! Evidence: Liberals Andrew Sullivan, John Cole (BalloonJuice) and others. They only look a bit left wing when you watch from the extreme right.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m for transparency when it comes to facts (ownership of a company being reported on, personal relationships about the subject of a story, etc.) But it’s unrealistic to ask for an accurate disclosure of political leanings. What’s the value of a reporter declaring him/herself “liberal” or “conservative” since those terms are totally relative to any given reader?

Of course reporters are bias - they are human (insert joke here). Often, though, we are not fully and consciously aware of our own bias or agenda.

There are journalistic standards about accuracy, fact-checking, etc. that are worth getting upset about. I just don’t think bias is one of them.

Anybody reading NY Times political writings (or this blog) shouldn’t need ’safe harbor language’. Bias exists. Readers beware.

Since there’s no contradiction, why shouldn’t they co-exist?

One, or both, could be wrong.

More likely, each is saying “pro-other side” from their point of view. That just tells us that what they’re seeing is between them, which doesn’t tell us where it actually is.

BTW - Journalists seem to be fond of saying things like “if both sides are mad at me, I must have done a good job”. That conclusion doesn’t actually follow, but the confidence with which they assert it does tell us about their critical thinking skills, or lack thereof.

A New Jersey reader’s March e-mail, for example, described one reporter as a “GOP operative/hack-writer” who “uncritically sounds his party’s theme today in a piece about the 2008 campaign.” But a Florida reader contended in a September e-mail that the anti-Bush political bias of the same Times staffer and a colleague “is in their DNA.”

Admittedly, I’ve not researched this at all, but taking the fact of those two e-mails existing at face value still leaves me with question about reporters’ bias. Clearly, you don’t buy Calame’s assertion that this disproves the notion of a bias. But can you explain WHY you don’t buy it? How do you account for these two facts (one reader is seeing a pro-Dem and one a pro-GOP bias) co-existing?

“Glover admitted to me that the Times’ editors removed a column from his chart that would have shown how each blogger made their disclosure”

See? Author’s bias, my a**! What about the editor’s bias???

Lots of places where I’ve worked the big motivation is impressing peers, not customers. Customers — and readers — are often remote; they come and go, but peers are, more or less, forever. And it’s the people you work with or for that determine what your average day at work is going to be like. The motivations the reporters listed are likely to give them greater status in the workplace, and that status makes people in the workplace more likely to cooperate with them and less likely to ignore or criticize them.

What’s often the case in newspapers and companies alike is that the group that the organization has been created to serve isn’t very real to the people who work there (think Dell).

This kind of transparency will only lead to readers dismissing valuable stories just because they disbelieve the information because they thik it’s triggered by the journalists bias (they’rer already doing that, but your ‘transparency’ would make it worse). Even authors who are putting lots of energy and efforts to write from a neutral point of view won’t be able to overcome thisd hurdle anymore. This is really an awful idea, Jeff!

And I wonder why you don’t mention the editors in your quest against bias. While the majority of reporters may lean to the liberal side (polls seem to confirm this), this surely isn’t rue of the editors, who are chosen by the media corporation’s management. Those big corporation lean more republican than democrat, and they chose editors that support their interests. And it’s the editors who have much more power than any scribe. You mentioned the struggle for page one, well, you makes those decisions? Who is responsible for reports about a new color for the iPod (just an imaginary example) showing up on A1 and reports about, say, extremist right wingers appointed to lead government agencies, voting problems with Diebold machines, bombings in Iraq, you name it, being relegated to A 10something?

Instead of simply repeating that oh-so-old right wing talking point of biased reporters, it would be more rewarding if you would analyze the power of the editors in shaping public opinion and what role their bias is playing in it.