Centerfield

I've argued for that very point, but I honestly think there's more to it than that. The farther up the "food chain" a journalist gets, the more he or she quits trying to appear unbiased. It's an ego thing.

Is the media biased? You bet! And while they may think they're playing to the market, they naturally assume their own views are mainstream and represent the market, whether they do or not. Where they don't represent the market, the assumption is that people who don't agree with them are stupid and need to be led to the correct way of thinking, whatever it takes.

That said, I'm much less concerned about blatant and obvious bias than I am about blatant dishonesty. Partisan editorialism masquerading as journalism will always be with us, because there is a market for it, both from the right and the left. But there's a big difference between editorialism, and the omission of facts and manufacturing of falsity. CNN's been noticably culpable in that regard, but NONE of the networks are innocent.

Here's a slightly different take that I've found useful:

http://rhetorica.net/bias.htm

Thankls for the link Erasmus, the content matches much of what I studied as a grad student regarding the academic view of media bias. I've felt it rung pretty true. The distressing thing I tended to run across in grad school along these lines of thought is that so many seemed to view the "every viewpoint is biased" thing as a liberation, as a jumping point into much left-wing "scholarship" that, for me, fell very flat. I found the people who delved deeply into deconstructionism became propressively more idiosyncratic, self-serving, and incoherent, and prone to relying on some variant of "every viewpoint is biased" whenever a dialogue didn't turn to their way of thinking. I'm putting this poorly, but maybe you know what I'm talking about?