Bias

I've been enjoying for the past couple of days the 'discussion' between Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber about alleged bias in an Economist story. Without giving away my feelings on the issue at hand, organized labor and immigration, I enjoyed Ms. Galt's eloquent refutation of the perceived bias in the Economist article.

it's the natural human tendency to find things more believable when they agree with what you already believe. Mr Farrell, I'd suggest, simply doesn't notice it in other papers because, well, they agree with him more, and hence he finds them more believable. The Economist is no less methodologically rigorous than any other paper anyone I know has written for; indeed, it is rather more rigorous than most about things like fact-checking. The difference is that The Economist states its opinions, rather than maintaining a facade of neutrality while slanting the article so that the readers come to the same conclusion that the reporter did. This, of course, is more irritating if you happen to disagree with the analysis, but it is not measurably more "objective".

I have the same view. Fox News is nearly universally hated in the liberal blogosphere for being 'right-wing hacks', but what if they only feel that way because watching Fox News makes liberals question the story because they viscerally disagree with how the story is presented, balanced. I'm not saying that Fox News is balanced, but I definitely think it's more balanced than CBS News or CNN. Liberals just can't see the bias in CBS because they believe the stories presented.