Up and down I sow them for lads like me to find

When I have a week in which I hate humanity a little too much, I reach for one of the therapeutic old standbys on the bookshelf. This weekend I dug back into a few chapters of Send In the Waco Killers and came across this charmer, which easily nails something righties and lefties often mistake for a quandary:

The apparent contradictions do take a little patience. Consider these three statements:

1) The vast majority of American reporters are honestly convinced that they and all of their cohorts are objective and politically neutral.

2) People from the political right, and especially Libertarians and constitutionalists, are convinced that 98 percent of the American media are handmaidens to the oppressive, collectivist state, puking forth little but undigested, unquestioned, manipulative, pro-government propaganda.

3) Both of the above statements are true.

The problem involves definitions and paradigms....

Reporters think "bias" is when you're accepting cash in plain brown envelopes to keep a corporate chemical spill out of the paper, or writing only nice things about a political candidiate because you're shacking up with him/her in the guest cabin on the weekends. If they're not involved in such stuff -- if they cover their press conferences and rewrite the government press releases the way they've been taught -- they take great offense at any accusation of "bias...."