The whole question of “media bias” has always seemed to me to be a remarkably unproductive one. What unbiased observer could doubt that the media is biased? But so are we all. Media bias is a mere truism, and those who waste their time fulminating against it seem to me to do so because they suffer from the delusion that the media ought to be, or even can be, unbiased. This fatal assumption plays into the hands of those who are responsible for the real problem with the media: its dishonesty— about its biases as about other things—and its self-importance. Such people will always and very happily argue for their un-bias with those who say they are biased— thereby demonstrating the largeness and openness of mind that is so often taken by the ignorant to betoken an absence of bias.

As if there were a logical inconsistency between being biased and being fair-minded! The metaphor of “bias” derives from the English game of ...

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