Where I work, I’ve never heard of a reporter or an editor do a story — or change a story — out of bias. Our corporate bosses have nothing to say about the news we cover (unless we write about the paper itself, but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Reporters are grunts. Guys and gals whose whole focus is to get stories — to “feed the beast” as the phrase goes. There are Democrats and Republicans, and I’m sure there are individual biases being reflected.

But there’s no corporate overseer planning our coverage. Reporters are *way* too cranky to submit to that kind of stuff. No reporter gets a message from his editor, “Management wants you to cover such-and-such.” It just doesn’t work that way.

Now, the editorial pages are a different story. That’s where management gets to express its views. On our paper, and I believe on most others, the two are very separate. (At my paper they’re on separate floors, in fact.) And reporters will sometimes agree, sometimes disagree with what comes out of Editorial.

That’s why I say that national TV news is where you’ll see the bias, because those broadcasts are much more controlled from above than newspaper stories. They’re carefully scripted, carefully planned. Papers — well, papers are just out there writing about whatever they can find to write about.