As objective as ethical

MoveOn is worried about media bias:

This Sunday, CNN engaged in one of the most troubling trends in political dialogue today — pitting a right-wing advocate against a journalist who is paid to be neutral and calling it a “balanced” discussion of political issues.

Discussing the president’s State of the Union address on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” were Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank and Byron York, which CNN described as “of National Review.”

What CNN did not say is that the National Review is a right-wing movement magazine and that York is author of the book Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. As could be expected, no progressive perspective was offered on President Bush’s biggest speech of the year….

Why would CNN do something so obviously unfair and unbalanced? Either they didn’t think about it, which is a huge problem, or this is just the latest example of a news outlet caving to the right-wing’s false charge of “liberal bias” in the media — presuming that any real journalist must inherently be liberal.

Perhaps that’s because at least 95 percent of “real” journalists are liberal. What passes for liberal logic runs thusly:

1. Journalists work for corporations
2. Corporations are conservative
3. Therefore, even genuinely liberal journalists are forced to be politically moderate.
4. And besides, they are trained to be objective in journalism school.

Of course, as I have previously proved, (2) is demonstrably false, as anyone who is so unfortunate as to have encountered the HR departments of the Fortune 500 knows. As for four, many journalists have never been to journalism school, even if one accepts the questionable idea that one can be trained to be objective.

One wonders if these trained, objective journalists would be willing to concede that every business executives who has taken an ethics course in the process of obtaining his MBA may therefore be considered ethical.