A Graduate Course in Media Bias

From The Other McCain - The Grammar and Rhetoric of Media Bias

I’m old enough to remember what journalism was about before cable news and the Internet had permanently altered the media landscape. It took me more than a decade of toiling at local newspapers in Georgia before I got hired by The Washington Times in 1997, and then spent an eventful decade in the newsroom there before striking out on my own as a freelancer/blogger. Part of my experience at The Washington Times was dealing with the stylebook as dictated by our legendary editor Wes Pruden who, for example, banned the word “controversial” from the pages of the newspaper. You see, “controversial” is one of those words by which journalists introduce bias in reporting. It’s a lazy word, a label applied to stigmatize someone a reported doesn’t like, and whom he wants the reader to dislike, e.g., “controversial talk-radio personality Rush Limbaugh.” And the stylebook as dictated by Pruden had a number of other rules like that, intended to prevent The Washington Times from being like practically every other newspaper in the country, written with little tricks of tendentiousness intended to prejudice the reader.

Go read the whole thing; it is worth your time.