Clark Hoyt, "Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves"

Alfino's recon notes:

I found four rationales here, all supporting the conclusion the "News coverage over a long [Presidential Election] campaign has been better and fairer than critics admit." The first rationale is a claim from an authority that reporters know they are under tremendous scrutiny, therefore they do focus on being objective. Second, the author claims that "Bias is a tricky thing," implying that is may not be easy to determine. To support this claim, the author points out that none of us is objective and that people in an audience he addressed thought the NYT was biased in a liberal direction, but it did break the Gov. Spitzer scandal and Spitzer was a Democrat. The implied premise here is that audiences do not necessarily judge bias fairly due to their own. The third rationale claims that "hostile media" research provides an explanation for the complexities of bias. If you add the premise that "The complexity of bias suggests that people do not fairly judge bias," then this rationale becomes a complete argument for the general conclusion. The final rationale is claims that the link between reporters liberal political bias (which is a fact) and bias in their coverage has not been established by the general research on this question.

Ok, gang. That's what I found. 10/30/2008 Alfino.