I expect the bias varies by department within a newspaper, rather than the whole newspaper. The Wall Street Journal tends to have very good, fair investigative reporters, and an incredibly right-wing Op-Ed page. The Times's political coverage can sometimes be laughably timid, just as Krugman and Herbert are ranting wildly in the Op-Eds.

I do think that the real problems tend to be laziness and timidity; outright bias is obvious and avowed and is easy to take into account. Although outright bias is no excuse for promulgating lies.

With the Terri Schiavo case, it's just a more dramatic headline to speak of "saving" her and of her "desperate hours" and stuff like that. I can see the appeal, from a newspaper-selling standpoint. But it sets a biased tone, even among people who would swear ferociously that they're not biased.

when did we and they start buying the idea that "he said/she said" is an adequate substitute for an evaluation of the merits of the claims on both sides?

One of the blogs I read recently the sports page as the last bastion of reality-based journalism.

Imagine trying to update your brackets for the NCAAs if your only source of information were, say, members of the White House Press Corps: "Texas Tech supporters were claiming victory Sunday after their regional quarterfinal game against Gonzaga. In Spokane, however, proponents of Gonzaga disputed this claim, noting that their team's point total was equal to that of Kentucky's and greater than that of Utah's, and that both of these teams are advancing to the next round."

Oh, brave new world. [link]

I like the Sith-Style Mouse Pad. I wanna get one - then I can say, "I'm mousin' Sith-Style." Or is Sith-Style something that one can possess independent of mousing?

I got Sith class and I got Sith style.

Last night on some news channel (I don't watch them and can't tell them apart) Pat Buchanan was arguing with a woman and a man over Terri Schiavo. Pat was yelling over them and spewing lies and ignoring him. The woman asked point blank "what about the hundreds of people whose feeding tubes are removed every day?" I'm not sure how accurate that number is. Pat yelled right over her about something else. Then she repeated the question and he got mad and told her he wasn't talking about ventilators but feeding tubes and she should know it's different. She looked like she was about to smack him and corrected him "I said feeding tubes, not life support, feeding tubes, what about those ---" and Pat cut her off and started yelling at her again. She tried to bring it up again but he yelled over her and never answered.

I flipped through the channels some and when I came back they were still arguing but about something different. Pat kept trying to say that he and she agreed on some point and she'd cut him off with "we do not agree. Don't speak for me, you can't speak for me." and then he'd try to put words in her mouth and she'd stop him again.

It was frustrating to watch. And yesterday I checked out the book "Attack Poodles" and tried to read some but it was just too depressingly real and it was written before the election so there was lots of "if the unthinkable happens and Bush is re-elected." to make it even more depressing.

Darth Maul was robbed.

I am blindingly exhausted, due to kravving until 10:30 yesterday night. Luckily the department bowling has been cancelled until further notice, so I don't have to spend the day braced against that.

Still, I'll be lucky to get home before 10 tonight.

From Susan's link:

Sports writers may inject into their stories a bit of personal opinion and local sympathy, but whatever biases they might have, the facts of the game are never in dispute.

This made me laugh, however, because I can think of 3 or 4 "news" stories in the last year which do just that think. Laura Vecsey in the Baltimore Sun and Jon Heyman in one of the NY rags -- the Daily News? -- both claimed that "it wasn't really blood" in the camera closeups of Curt Schilling's bloody ankle. Plenty of fans, and a couple of columnists, claimed that the A-Rod slap play wasn't interference. Dagger Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe is notorious for creating a story where there isn't one, by selectively quoting one person to another, and soliciting inflammed reactions (the "who's got the ball" controversy, which he manufactured out of thin air).

Now, none of these bias-or-outright-lies stories changed the outcome of a game, because one of the rules is that umpires are the ultimate judges and their rulings cannot be overturned. But they certainly change public perception about the games, and in some cases they can affect things like trades and contract talks.

And after all, baseball is riddled with accepted truths that turn out not to be true at all. That's what sabermetrics is all about.

I dunno about the mouse pad.

One full-color sublimated mouse pad

What precisely is a Sith mouse pad sublimating? The mind quails.

I don't think I'd go as far as to declaim the entire profession's laziness and/or timidity. Journalists are professionals, and, like most things, inadequacies or omissions are probably the result of money and time. It is difficult to investigate every claim made by every party, while it is still news people will read to just report on what each side says. So if you're a cash-strapped newspaper, what do you do?

On the other hand, I have had a relationship with a journalist who was covering something I was involved in. He was fairly shocked about what was going on, but when he would write stories that reflected the absurdity of the events, the paper's editors would change them to better fit in with the pre-conceived notions of their market.

Darth Maul was robbed.

He never got the Sith-style mousepad?

Oh, he's not even on the Sith-style mousepad. Everyone knows he was the most stylin' Sith....