The American people benefit when journalists perform — impartially — their job of keeping the public informed about the actions of elected leaders. We are not well served when supposedly impartial journalists infuse their reporting with personal value judgments and opinions.
Yet liberal bias in the news media is so painfully obvious that it is practically accepted by many Americans as the norm — albeit an unfortunate and dishonest norm.
Still, it was jarring when a purportedly objective journalist recently posed a remarkably biased question to President Barack Obama during a press conference.
Referring to Republican presidential hopefuls’ views on interrogating terrorists, CNN reporter Dan Lothian asked the president if he thought the Republicans were “uninformed, out of touch or irresponsible.”
Even the president — the beneficiary of so much unskeptical news coverage of his administration — seemed to find such a loaded question amusing.
“That’s a multiple-choice question, isn’t it?” he asked with a laugh.
But it is not amusing to the American people when we must sort through journalists’ personal biases to try to get the facts we need to be informed voters and citizens.