I could easily get carried away with comments about your latest post re Orcinus's manifesto and Paul Cohen's response. Notwithstanding my miserable failure the last time I tried to be brief, I will try again:

(1) I think, in your laudable desire for nonpartisan even-handedness, you nevertheless have a certain tendency to fall prey to what I call the Mickey Kaus fallacy -- i.e., that those who defend their arguments vigorously and passionately are "shrill" and therefore inherently less trustworthy than those who adopt the veneer of sober impartiality. I'm all in favor of rational inquiry, but just because someone makes a point of using nonpartisan language doesn't mean that their arguments are necessarily more valid, or that they are likelier to have their facts straight. (It's possible they may be more persuasive, but that's another question entirely.)

(2) The most frustrating problem with accusations of media bias is the assumption that the media ought to give equal weight to both sides of every issue. This is nonsense, of course. The media's job is to report relevant facts. But if, for instance, NPR truthfully reports relevant facts that happen to be embarrassing to the right, they are flooded with accusations of liberal bias. Ted Koppel was accused of liberal bias (and even had his show suspended in some media markets) simply for devoting a program to reading the names of fallen U.S. soldiers, for crying out loud. (Would conservatives have objected if Bill O'Reilly had done the same on his Fox News show?) The infamously "shrill" Paul Krugman wrote, "The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla, much of the media -- fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of 'balance' -- won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown." The result is that in order to deflect widespread accusations of liberal bias, the mainstream media eschews fact-checking and investigative reporting in favor of "he-said, she-said" stenography. Really, it's not bias that's the problem, it's the bending-over-backward-to-avoid-the-appearance-of-bias that's the problem.

(3) There is no such thing as unbiased reporting. There is only reporting whose bias goes undetected or unchallenged. I would much prefer the American media to wear their bias openly, like British newspapers do. In my view, reporting is easier to understand and evaluate when the reporter's agenda is laid bare, and more difficult to understand when the reporter works hard to suppress or hide his or her own views. I think a vigorous, highly partisan -- but aggressively fact-checked -- public debate would ultimately serve us much better than what the mainstream media has to offer. I would also dispute your view that the partisan blogosphere doesn't back up assertions with facts. For instance, Atrios has -- on a number of occasions -- explained exactly why various aspects of Bush's economic forecasts are misleading. He just happens to do it using highly charged language, which you don't like. But he also happens to be correct.

(4) With regards to Paul Cohen's comments, I appreciate his contribution, and he is, as you say, a thoughtful and interesting writer. But I can't help but point out that someone who believes that CNN and ABC News are biased towards the left, who believes that Bush's competence is constantly questioned by the media (when and by whom? Certainly not in any White House press conference from Sept. 2001 to perhaps a few months ago), who insists the Clinton scandals -- plural -- were "real" (which ones? Whitewater? "Travelgate"? Vince Foster? Juanita Broderick?), and who seems unaware of just how poorly the Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision is regarded even by conservative legal scholars (no one has even seriously argued that the decision would have been the same had the plaintiff and defendant been reversed) -- well, Mr. Cohen may be as yet undecided as to who to vote for, but with all due respect I would humbly suggest that he's no less partisan than I am. He's simply insufficiently disgusted with Bush (yet) to commit to holding his nose and voting for the other side.

I didn't read Orcinus before I wrote to you, but now that I do, I notice that Dave Neiwert said much the same thing I said, only shorter. I guess that's why he has the big, popular blog and I don't. [grin]

Journalist and academic Jay Rosen, on bias: