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Say something loud enough and frequently enough and a good many people will believe it is true. For decades, conservatives have howled that most major TV news sources, including ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, and three major U.S. newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have a pronounced liberal slant. This year, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg hit the bestseller lists with a book titled "Bias," which described the liberal sins of network news, and conservative pundit Ann Coulter had another bestseller with "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right." As Goldberg put it, "The old argument that the networks and other 'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore."
So, how do you explain the "liberal" media's failure to rebuke Sen. Trent Lott for the string of pro-segregationist pronouncements that came before his infamous gaffe at Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party? Or the media's curious lack of interest in George W. Bush's windfall at Harken Energy and indifference to his stonewalling a Securities and Exchange Commission report investigating the episode? Or their unwillingness to challenge Vice President Dick Cheney on his cozy relationship with the energy industry while he was drafting the country's energy policy?
It sure doesn't sound like a liberal media. Rather, it sounds downright conservative, which is what some liberals are saying. In their view, the conglomerates that own most of the news media are promoting their own interests, and those interests tend to be conservative.
But there is a third and more disturbing possibility in which both sides have gotten it wrong. Looking at it philosophically rather than ideologically, the real media war today isn't between liberals and conservatives but between two entirely different journalistic mind-sets: those who believe in advocacy, and those who believe in objectivity -- or, at the very least, in the appearance of objectivity. And what we are witnessing is not just a political skirmish but a battle for the soul of American journalism.
Most of us take it for granted that the media should be disinterested, but for the better part of the history of American journalism, this would have been regarded as idiotic. Throughout the 18th and...