My speculation is that, in part, this stems from the fact that, in an increasingly specialized society, journalists tend to be generalists who simply cannot have the breadth of knowledge necessary to adequately convey the complexity of a given story. That bothers me more than any ostensible “bias.” We don’t get much complexity in stories about Iraq. We didn’t get, in my opinion, much complexity in the pre-war stories about the issues leading to the war. I find that it is necessary to read specialized publications–e.g., I subscribe to a variety of foreign policy journals–to get a real sense of the complexity. Perhaps this is an unfair standard, but I sense that journalists simply don’t know enough (and maybe they can’t)to fully cover the stories. This leads to coverage that, in my view, is often simplistic (whether “liberal” or “conservative”) and fails to convey the difficult choices involved. As a result, it seems to me, people get a distorted view of how things work–not from any ideological bent by the journalist but because the stories present a much more black and white view of the world than actually exists. This can be read as bias if you believe that your position has been incorrectly portrayed.