So I go through periods where I listen to WABC every morning (typical morning drive political banter stuff, with Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who presents the conservative view in a generally thickheaded but amiable way; and activist lawyer Ron Kuby, who presents the liberal view in a carefully thought-out but sophistic and lawerly diction*) and then periods where I go back to WNYC, the local NPR affiliate. I would probably switch back and forth more frequently except that the radio in my bedroom has a manual tuner.
I've been on an NPR kick recently and something I heard the other morning got me thinking about the subtle ways that bias creeps into news. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the details of the story but it was a straight news piece (not analysis) that mentioned in passing (not the focus of the piece) the "memos written by the Bush administration authorizing torture."
It is hard to understand how that could get past a competent editor without being flagged. Consider that the same mention could be written as "Memos written by the Bush administration forbidding torture." Now I'm guessing that such a line would be derided by liberal bloggers as evidence of the evil Faux News conspiracy attempt to cover up Bush's perfidy.
Either way, it's a biased statement. Because there is disagreement among reasonable people whether the particular actions described in the memo are torture or not. The whole point of the memos was to attempt to define what is and is not torture.
Here's an improvement:
"Memos that critics of the Bush administration claim authorizes torture." (Here we can acknowledge the controversy about the memos without taking a side whether it's torture or not.)
Or why not just
"Memos that set the limits on physical force that can be used in interrogations." (This is a factual statement, and neutral. If it was relevant to the story, it could be expanded to say that some critics claim the limits include torture while the administration claims otherwise.)
*An example of this was during the stem-cell veto debate, Kuby insisted despite several listeners calling in and making it very clear that they believe an embryo should not be destroyed at any point after conception that "there is no principled reason to forbid federal funding of stem cell research." Pure sophistry. If there was no principled reason to forbid stem cell research, no one would be complaining about it. It's not that we conservatives just think stem cells are icky or something. We just happen to have an act-oriented ethic rather than a utilitarian one. And generally when one talks about "principles" it is in terms of means, not ends. (This bears some further thinking on my part.)
Oh, can can I also vent about the idiots who seem to think that the Christian concept of martyr and radical Islamic concept of martyr are equivalent? Thus so-called Christianists who say things like "we should be prepared to die for Christ" are just a step away from blowing themselves up in crowded busses. Do you people have even the vaguest possible idea about Christian theology? Vacation Bible School (even in your most whacked-out evangelical fundamentalist hardline Protestant variety) is not quite a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. This kind of thinking (which is quite prevalent online) is either willful stupidity or grave calumny (dare I say bigotry?). But I guess this is the same crowd that thinks the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a brilliant riposte to thousands of years of Christian theology.