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We need, instead, to spend some time figuring out what we can honorably do to nudge those polling results back up.

Mr. Jones:

It is not really that difficult. People have been telling you what you need to do for a long time. You just don't want to hear it.

You saw how close the election was in 2000. Most elections are like that. What it means is that the population is roughly divided in half between those who lean left, and those who lean right.

This isn't true in your newsroom, is it? It isn't true in hardly any newsroom. Poll after poll taken of journalists show that journalists as a group are overhwelmingly Democratic in their politics.

Half of the population can see this in everything you write. We see it in the choice of stories you think are important, and the stories you ignore. We see it in the way you choose the "experts" who get quoted in your stories. We see it in the way you turn to certain left-leaning groups time after time to provide special-interest perspective.

It all seems quite normal to you, I'm sure. The groups and expert you choose are "mainstream." All journalists use them. Yes, they do. And half of the population sees the lot of you as a bunch of left-leaning propagandists for doing it.

When is the last time a major-newspaper journalist called the president of Concerned Women for America, instead of Kim Gandy of NOW, for the "women's" side of an issue? NOW is full of avowed Marxists, for God's sake; they don't even hide it. CWA has ten times the membership, yet it is ignored... because it is not of the political left. You do this on every issue, from the environment to foreign trade. All your experts, all your membership groups, all your "think tanks" and "research institutes" are of the Left. You hadn't noticed that? We do. We notice it every time you do it.

You know what you need? You need Newsroom Diversity. And never mind the racial or gender makeup; what you need is political diversity. So long as 90-plus per cent of working journalists belong to one political party, and color everything they write and do with the perspective associated with that political party, that half of the public which does not share your political belief system will continue to find you untrustworthy, biased, and worst of all, arrogant about it.

What it means is that the population is roughly divided in half between those who lean left, and those who lean right.

Beautiful post, but with this one little flaw. Actually, the public tends to be divided in thirds: Those who lean left, those who lean right, and those who don't know which way they lean and may not care very much either.

Politicians, journalists and others who think polls matter, start to worry when that uncommitted third starts to make up their minds.

And in that third, while committment may be uncommon, a survival instinct is not. Consequently, they don't like the way the media has taken an adversarial stance against the necessary terror war (and against the president who initiated it).

Losing the "swing voters" who normally don't complain has got the media worried, but not worried enough to actually change anything.