We’re told <\/a>that the President of the United States doesn’t read beyond the front page because he detects a hostile ideological bias in most reporting. He says:<\/p>\n My antennae are finely attuned …. I can figure out what so-called ‘news’ pieces are going to be full of opinion, as opposed to news. So I’m keenly aware of what’s in the papers, kind of the issue du jour. But I’m also aware of the facts. …. It can be a frustrating experience to pay attention to somebody’s false opinion or somebody’s characterization, which simply isn’t true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Meanwhile, I have known many colleagues who think that all reporting and commentary in the “corporate” press is false and deliberately misleading. These leftists would be just as happy as Instapundit<\/a> to see the word “lies” spray-painted across the New York Times.<\/i><\/p>\n I’m a consistent critic of the major newspapers myself–and TV news is beneath contempt. But I don’t see how you can be a responsible observer of the world unless you use the raw material that the mainstream press provides. Sometimes the quality of coverage is poor. But to reject it all is to walk in that “absolute night when all cows are black.” If you despise the most detailed sources of information, then you can make no distinctions except on the basis of your original prejudices.<\/p>\n Besides, sometimes we distrust the news because it’s uncomfortable stuff. Conservatives don’t like to read about incompetent Republican presidents or about the prevalence of poverty and racism. Liberals don’t like to read about the real failures of government and the real costs and limits of regulation. Centrists don’t like to read that there are legitimate arguments between right and left. Yet real progress comes from facing these difficult facts.<\/p>\n I’m increasingly worried about a kind of criticism that I suspect George Bush employs, along with many other Americans. Chris Betram puts it well<\/a>: readers look for “symptomatic silences” and “accuse people of indifference or lack of balance for failing to mention some event or incident.”<\/p>\n It’s easy to play this game. You make up your own mind about what’s important (based on reading some <\/i>news source) and then assess other publications–including editorial columns and blogs<\/a>–to see whether they accord an appropriate amount of space to each story. I guess that’s an acceptable way to criticize newspapers that claim to report “all <\/i>the news that’s fit to print” (or the equivalent). However, it should never be an excuse for failing to read the news. Even if a newspaper devotes the wrong amount of space to each item because of a systematic ideological bias, we can still get lots of information from reading it. To assume that other people will be miseducated because editors emphasize the wrong stories is to hold our fellow citizens in rather low regard.<\/p>\n