You're Biased, I'm Not

This Against the Grain commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer. In You're Biased, I'm Not, Dick Meyer writes:

Bias is the same way. If someone accuses you of being biased, the conversation is over. You're not going to convince them that you're not biased or that they are biased, too. Someone who plays the bias card does not want to understand another perspective even out of curiosity. They just want to hear things they agree with and be able to dismiss all the rest.

When people talk about bias explicitly, they mostly talk about media bias. Thirty years ago, the prevailing theme was a sort of Marxist analysis that all Big Media had an inevitable pro-capitalist, Neanderthal bias. That view shrunk to the margins and the dominant complaint now is that Big Media has a liberal bias, which mostly means pro-Democratic. However, I now get accused of being biased almost as much by the left as the right, but the e-mail from the left is now meaner.

Emphasis Mine

The last sentence has me intrigued because e-mail responses to sites such as Ted Rall and Tom Tomorrow show that the right sends e-mails that are mainly death threats, rape threats, and a series of homophobic references.

The first charge about the Marxist analysis of MSM is a smoke-screen. The reason Dick Meyer gets paid is to promote the interests of his employer. And his employer is interested in the promotion and the furtherence of the Capitalist system. The charge about being Neanderthal is just a red herring.