Right. It seems there aren't many reporters left who are capable of gathering facts and writing them down in plain english.
News gathering itself is inherently subjective. Who do you talk to, and why? What do you ask him?
A reporter has to limit his sources and write within space and time constraints. As a consequence of this limitation, journalists have to inform themselves before covering a story.
Typically (at least before the internet), journalists prepared themselves by reading their own newspaper's previous coverage in the paper's "morgue", or file repository. Therefore, the paper's own biases become self-perpetuating.
In too many cases, a journalist will write his story before he covers it, knowing who will say what, and will simply look for people to give him the quotation (or selective information) that bolsters his own point of view. A rushed reporter will do this. A lazy one will as well. And, more to the point, a reporter with an agenda will do this.
Journalism is an art masquerading as a science. A science has data points, a specific methodology and repeatable results. Journalists get to make their own choices about whom to speak with, what to ask and how to structure their articles.
I think that the obvious bias of the news media was kept on a low burn for most of the 20th century, but it was there. The difference between now and then is that in the past (except for certain acute times, like the Nixon administration), the mainstream media believed that there were people of good will on both sides. Today, the mainstream media believes that this is a war of good versus evil -- and President Bush, his administration and his policies are evil. As a result, the media have gone beyond all balance (in my own cheap shot, I have taken to calling the mainstream media the "access of evil").
It's very interesting that the solution (the internet, the bloggers and Free Republic) came about just at the time when they are needed most keenly as a result of the meltdown of the meinstream media.