dissent

[Doug Millison]

Malign,

I think you're getting the message and messenger mixed up.  Go ahead and
disagree with the authors of those articles I'm passing along -- I'm doing
that to stimulate thought and discussion, after all.  If you're interested
in digging deeper to understand press bias, rather than recreate their
work, I point you, agan, to FAIR, MediaChannel.org, and other organizations
that offer media critique.

Maybe you don't know that journalism also includes the articles that go on
the editorial page of a newspaper, or other opinion pieces -- the sort of
thing that the New York Times publishes on its Op-Ed page.  There's news
journalism, and there's opinion journalism. The latter category includes
editorial cartoons, too.  Opinion journalism is where the writer -- the
journalist -- takes a specific position with regard to an issue, and often
puts together an argument with the aim of persuading the reader to agree
with that position. Op-ed journalism can, of course, reflect a spectrum of
political views -- on the right, as it does in a publication like the Wall
Street Journal, for example, and on the left as it will in The Nation.
Opinion journalism is usually pretty easy to spot.  It's the unconscious
ideological bias creeping into so-called news journalism that you have to
watch out for, and  the only way to guard against that is to read from a
wide variety of news sources, with an understanding of how the
news-gathering, editing, and publishing processes can insitute a particular
ideological bias.

I hope that helps clarify things for you a bit.






Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com