ants in my goggles

This Bush remark is a really good example of how it's impossible to be completely without bias in a news story. Here's a story from Yahoo! on it in which democrats are pouncing and Fleischer is clarifying, there's some talk of what's actually been happening in Iraq, there's a talking head saying that Bush gets rhetoric-y when under stress, then another telling us that Americans liked hearing what Bush is now being attacked for saying, and not to blame the Dems becasue it's their job as candidates to attack stuff like that. Here's one from Google (Associated Press) which focuses on Gephardt (a lot), Kerry, Graham, Kerry, and Dean (Gephardt's opponents), and ends on criticism of Bush from Dean; one from USA Today, which includes several quotes from Gephardt, descriptions of some of the attacks Bush was attempting to denounce, and ends on descriptions of other presidently things Bush is doing.

None of the articles seem particularly well-organized. That's beside my point, though, which is that it's easy to word things in such a way to cast good light and bad light on things. Why not run a quote from someone saying it's Fleischer's job to paraphrase the president's words into less contentious meanings, so he shouldn't be faulted for it (which also would imply that we shouldn't take him seriously), just like the one about Dems criticizing b/c it's part of their job? Why do some candidates get 5 paragraphs of Bush criticism while others get one?

I'm not saying that all these stories are biased to a conservative viewpoint, not by a longshot. The fact that the Yahoo! story was at the top of the news list (and has been for a while now) is probably serving more of a liberal viewpoint; the story on the same issue was near the bottom of the Google news page. It's just so interesting that we always hear about how the news media is supposed to be objective, but that's really an impossible goal. Wouldn't it be better to acknowledge and learn how to navigate the bias of the media?