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Interest in LAT Editor John Carroll's memo on liberal bias (originally posted here at L.A. Observed) has been heavy, especially at the conservative punditry sites. Opinion Journal's James Taranto led Best of the Web Today with it (thanks for the traffic boost), National Review Online posted it and the blogs of the right like Instapundit have used it as proof of various indiscretions. Unfortunately, SoCal radio and Weekly Standard pundit Hugh Hewitt's mangling isn't unusual: his sole takeaway is that "Carroll confessed to liberal bias." (Another recent Hewitt take on the LAT)
Actually, in the memo I read, Carroll says he doesn't see that much liberal bias at the LAT -- but his main point is that he intends to eliminate what there is. He said much the same earlier this month at an editor's conference. The AP quote is: "Our paper is perceived because of some things in the past as being politically correct and having a liberal bias, and we are moving heaven and Earth to play the facts and truth right down the middle," Carroll said. "We're really trying to get that in the past."
In his post on it today, James Lileks, a favorite of bloggers in part because he is a newspaper guy who evangelizes the blog, said "media bias is not a plot. It is not a grand scheme." He's been in newsrooms and knows what the pundits blinded by ideology ignore -- that newspaper reporters are a pretty apolitical bunch these days. Not necessarily unbiased, they have had their various life experiences, but I mostly agree with Lileks when he says: "It's been my experience in 20+ years that no one slants the news to achieve a particular political objective."
I don't know that "no one" does. There are exceptions. But it's been my experience in 25 years around reporters that it's unusual. Most reporters at the LAT don't have sufficient political motivation to have an active agenda, which is hard for the ideologues on right and left who do view everything through political filters to accept. Reporters mostly just want to get the story. There really is a strong current of professional ethics that argues against a political agenda. It doesn't -- repeat, doesn't -- work every time, but look who's trying to eliminate bias. It's Carroll, not the partisans. They don't care about objectivity, they want their side to win, and that's fine. But the entity with the most interest in actually being fair and balanced is the newspaper.
As for the L.A. Times, the left finds the paper biased too, in favor of corporations and the two-party system and against change. Pardon my repeating an earlier L.A. Observed item, but Jesse Walker at the actively libertarian Reason Online wrote this month: "'Media bias is usually code for 'insufficient bias toward my views.'"