Today's New York Times story on Ken Tomlinson's hired gun analysis on liberal bias in public broadcasting is more about injecting bias into news than eliminating it. By supposedly uncovering bias, the study was meant to provide the rationale for Tomlinson to inject right-wing rhetoric into public news in order to provide "balance." But the whole equation is based on the principle that news is inherently biased (see above post). If these journalists were actually trying to find some objective truth -- based on fact, not rhetoric -- than balance is a non-issue. Truth is the ultimate value -- truth substantiated by evidence.

Notice that the broadcasters quoted in the story are "stunned," and say they try to be informative, not "polemical." This is probably true, which is why they are under attack. The Bush administration has mounted a very successful assault on journalism as objective truth-seeking by having their propogandists trumpet the value of "balance." They trump objectivity and truth with fairness, defining it as providing the viewpoints of all sides of a news event, without (this is the important part) coming to a conclusion about the veracity of either perspective. The primacy of "fairness" over truth has led to the most disheartening trend in journalism -- the news story written or reported by taking one party's press release, running it with quotes from the opposing party's press release, and offering no independent assessment of the truth of either. This is the basic content of most Washington news coverage today.

And this is what the radical right wants, because the "balance" battle is one they are fully armed to win. If truth becomes the primary goal of journalism, they're in trouble.