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 bowls, in which balls the size of grapefruits (but each
weighing about as much as a brick), are rolled across smooth lawns
toward each other. The “bias” refers to the tendency of the ball,
because of the uneven distribution
of its weight, to roll one way rather than another. The object of
the game is to compensate for the bias in one’s bowling and so to
make the ball roll true. There is, so far as I know, no organized
movement dedicated to the elimination