Well, it was enough to make a cat laugh, as Mark Twain says. Normally, I don’t like to write about “media bias.” You can’t have an argument with someone who doesn’t argue in good faith, and those who deny the charge of bias are nearly always doing so in bad faith. The privileged position occupied by the media in the national debate depends absolutely on frequent and vehement official insistence on their neutrality and “objectivity”—even though these ritual and unbelievable assertions fly in the face of the obvious truth that everyone is biased except those who simply don’t care. Apologists for “objectivity” acknowledge this fundamental truth on the one hand while insisting on the other on their “professional” qualification not to be affected by it, an absurd position. But if their refusal to see that the media are not just sometimes but always biased disqualifies them from having anything further to say of interest on the subject, it also means that they are not infrequently good for a laugh when the absurdities of their position are made manifest, or when they charge someone else with bias.

As a rule, the guardians of journalistic purity are too busy denying bias in themselves to be quite comfortable saying tu quoque. It might almost seem like a confirmation of their own bias to accuse someone else of it. Thus Tom Brokaw on the “Donahue” show last summer when asked about bias on the network news preferred to change the subject,