[mountaineer]

Excellent, thought-provoking article. That's a book I definitely want to read! As a reporter for a small-city newspaper, I have had to write objectively even when I held very strong views on the subject, and even when I thought the politician I was interviewing was a complete idiot. My publisher does not tolerate bias of the type described.

Unfortunately, I see more and more recent j-school grads who not only cannot write (does no one teach grammar or spelling any more?), but truly believe their job is to shape the readers' beliefs and opinions, rather than report the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story. Maybe that's the way "journalists" are portrayed in movies, I don't know, but that certainly is what we're seeing in the examples cited in the article.

[maica]

j-school grads who ... truly believe their job is to shape the readers' beliefs and opinions, rather than report the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story.

This is evident at any Presidential press conference. The foreign reporters usually ask a who, what, when, where or why and how question. It is refreshingly noticed because of its rarity.