Thanks Sam, terrific job, fascinating and confirms a lot of my own thoughts on the matter. Welcome!

Everyone go check out his very cool Allsci mag.

Is anyone surprised that a media professor would say the media is not biased?

"Bias" is actually a tricky term. Bias, in my mind, does not mean you hold a particular point of view; it means you insert that point of view into "news" reporting.

You often hear about "objectivity" as well. There is no objectivity when humans are concerned. Everybody has beliefs, opinions and points of view.

So are members of the media objective? No. Are they biased? Sometimes.

I can tell you as a former professional journalist and close relative of a retired national TV reporter that most journalists are, in fact, liberals. That's from first-hand experience.

I have never been surprised by that fact, since kids who go into journalism school are often "out to change the world" and they realize they are heading into a low-paying profession. Those two factors tend to appeal more to liberals than conservatives.

And if you look at the big conservative "news" people, they are more likely to be converted lawyers, politicians, etc. who made their money long before they entered "journalism".

So I think it's clear that those working in the media, in general, lean left politically, although some will dispute that.

But it's one thing to hold a distinct political viewpoint as a journalist and another to push that agenda and viewpoint through the "news" you cover.

As I said, "bias", in my mind, is when a journalist's politics make their way into a news story and are used to distort the facts.

Bias happens, but it's not as rampant as the right-wingers would have you believe (except, of course, in the right-wing venues such as Rush, Hannity, etc. where they are much more likely to pass off opinion as "news"). Eliminating bias is the role of editors and producers. And good editors and producers keep the bias out of the news.

Does bias get into the news? Absolutely. Liberal bias is fairly common, but it's also common for new outlets to be biased against "big business", against local politicians, etc. And local news is probably the worst, playing anybody and anything they can off as evil to boost ratings. That's their particular bias.

However, I think the most dangerous incidents of bias are those organized on an institutional level. I think the reporting the L.A. Times did in advance of the governor's race (and the timing of their reporting) shows a clear bias toward derailing the candidacy of Arnold.

He didn't say there isn't bias, he said it isn't consistent or systematic over the big picture.

Yeah, and I agree with that, which was supposed to be part of my point ...

But I think most of the discussion seems to be "there's no bias" (the left) or "everything's biased" (the right). Of course, the truth is in between.

Yes, any given story can be biased (and they often are), and even general coverage of a given story can show a bias, but "media bias" as some kind of monolith does not exist.

I agree with Professor Lee that there is no conclusive evidence that journalists' ideological and partisan opinions influence their reporting. In fact, influence does not inhibit news from being reported, i.e. it does not change the nature of the news, but rather the effect. The effect is influenced from a purely subjective level of interpretation so just as Lee's ball example, one must chose to be unsympathetic or favorable and create a personal an often unintentional bias. However, this bias is shaped not from one source of news, but from multiple interpretations and applications of our paradigm. As far as tastefulness goes, news is to be influential in some non-esoteric way.