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You all are on to something, but it is considerably worse than you might suspect.

Yahoo doesn’t have reporters; nearly all of the articles you read on Yahoo are from the newswires, esp. AP. The AP also supplies MSN.com, etc, newsfeeders, and many stories in MSM come AP as well. For example, there’s an article in the NYT about 6 people being poisoned at Harvard. The exact same article— same text, everything— appears on Yahoo, because it comes from the AP. But if you didn’t know it was from the same source (and most people don’t) you’ll think that the story has had multiple levels of verification. In fact, it’s had none.

So millions of people are getting their news from different sources that ultimately get it from the same source.

What is the nature of this source? As a random example, take the editor of National Reporting, Sara Nordgren: she spent 14 years prior writing about “children and family issues.”

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but you see how there might possibly be some bias. Ok, here’s a cut and paste of everyone on AP’s website under National Reporting:

AP’s National Reporting Team is a group of Natonal Beat Reporters

New York:
Sarah Nordgren - Editor

David Crary - National Writer, Family and Relationships

Rachel Zoll - National Writer, Religion

Deborah Hastings - National Writer, Justice/Legal

Chicago:
Martha Irvine - National Writer, Young Readers

Denver:
Eric Gorski - National Writer, Religion

Philadelphia:
Jesse Washington - National Writer, Race Relations

Raleigh, N.C.:
Justin Pope - National Writer, Higher Education

http://www.ap.org/pages/contact/address/national.html

The “natonal” typo is theirs, not mine.

So you can see that it’s not that any single person is biased or not, but that there exists a culture, a philosophy, in the newsroom that is going to come out in reporting.

If AP was just another news source, like the NYT, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But the AP is both highly pervasive, and also generally unknown. You read it in the Post, you think it’s from the Post. You see a “similar” story nine other times, and you think enough people aer saying the same thing, it must be true.