Wolf --

Thanks for the information links. I'll look at them tonight.

Booklady --

It's one of the weird quirks of American political discourse that we think of liberals as "the left" and mainstream Republicans as "the right". As an Argentinian coworker of mine once said, in other countries the elected officials represent a range of political parties that hold widely divergent views on public policy, where in the U.S. we mostly see two slightly divergent flavors of the same centrist party.

If liberals are flaming leftists, what are communists and social revolutionaries (no, I'm not necessarily conflating the two)? If mainline Republicans are right-wingers, what are -- well, take your pick based on how you define the right wing: Pat Robertson theocrats or the Christian Coalition any number of militia groups? The true left and true right both want to change the fundamental organization of American society, whereas we run-of-the-mill liberals and conservatives want to affect social policy from within the existing structure. If you'd said that CNN worked from a liberal understanding of the world, I wouldn't have challenged it, but you said "left," which wasn't consistent with what I've seen on CNN.

As for "unbiased" news coverage, there's no such thing. Because an editor cannot include stories on every single thing that happens in the world, there's a gatekeeping process built into news reporting. Editors include what they consider relevant, and obviously that's going to be based on reality as they understand it. "Politics" in the broad sense of the word will creep into that, since almost every aspect of life is political in some sense. An editor who believes that the world ecology is on the brink of collapse will choose different stories than someone who believes the environment is resilient enough to take whatever we throw at it. Bias affects every aspect of reporting, right down to whether the on-screen caption text for war coverage reads "War in Iraq" or "Operation Iraqi Freedom." That's why relying on any one news source -- or even any one country's news sources -- gives a very incomplete picture. The best broadcast reporters and interviewers -- Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, and any number of people at the BBC whose names I don't recall -- make sure that multiple views make it to the air and insist on careful fact checking. This last is what I most want from a journalist: a care not to report something until it has been checked and double-checked. Rather has been particularly admirable on that count, sometimes holding back single-sourced major stories till a day or two after other networks have put them out, waiting for corroboration.