> All of them are biased, just in different directions. The Washington Post claims to be far left, Fox News leans conservative, CNN is quite liberal,

I visit cnn.com nearly every day, and they change their reader poll at least once a day, sometimes more than that. It's fascinating to notice that the results of the polls are very often conservative/Republican. As I don't have cable, I can't say anything about the CNN television channel.

>the New York Post is conservative, the Oregonian offers both points of view but the majority is liberal. Online news sites tend to be more polarized. I've heard several figures, but the resident journalist (Ellmyruh) says roughly 85% of journalists are registered Democrats, so it's entirely natural that more news companies are biased towards the left than the right.

I got this figure from my Mass Media Communications professor last semester. She's VERY much into politics, commentated on the debates for CBS, had calls from reporters across the country on election day, and has also done such things as work for the FCC. She's currently preparing to take a leave of absence to work for a company that's pushing for free and/or subsidized Internet. (I don't mean to open a new can of worms, but I just want to show how fascinating this lady is.)

Anyway, she is a self-described "pro-life Democrat from West Texas." Last semester, she showed us a video called something like "The Conservative Bias in the Media." I did quite a bit of research on bias in the media when I was in high school, and I found the video very interesting, even if I didn't really buy some of the points made in it.

Here is my idea, although I really don't have a lot of solid proof to back it up yet: I think those involved in the media are not necessarily biased toward one side or the other, but they try too hard to NOT be biased. In the process, they defeat their own purpose. Similarly, while the ultimate goal of every journalist is to win the Pulitzer, the goal is not to stick one's neck out so far that the head gets chopped off. If you simply go along with the other journalists in the field, your chances of being singled out--by both your peers and your critical audience--go down.

> gab"Rush is incredibly biased, but he's funny"by

Ell"Convincing myself to become a journalist again"myruh