The Iron Yuppie

The Kerry Spot on National Review Online

I disagree with Mr. Geraghty on two points:

1) "So many American news consumers" may be a bit of an exaggeration. First, the NYT and WaPo still get more readership than most other daily papers put together. Further, reading news is not exclusive... it is possible to read more than one news source in a given news cycle. With online aggregators, either through blogs, web sites and the like, I would argue that it is more likely than ever that people get multiple view points on a given story.

2) The coverage at the Belmont Club as well as the Captain's Quarters appears to be just as biased in the opposite direction. Except for the one comment from Hilary Clinton about the success of the Insurgency (is that capitalized or what?), they are all positive stories, including the non-story about Canada sending 30 soldiers to train Iraqis. Surely there must be SOMETHING negative happening in Iraq that can be covered.

Perhaps the problem here is not the publication of the stories, but the perception of unbiasedness of any outlet. I've read the NYT for a long time, and I've thought it to be fairly unbiased, so I may be a bad test for this, but what we really need is not for outlets to change their reporting style, but to have an unambigous way of understanding exactly what a news outlet's biases really are. Accurate ways of measuring and reporting this are yet to be determined.