Bad bias and good bias

My emailbox this morning had a general letter from Matt McDonald, the new publisher, editor-in-chief, and CEO of the NewBostonPost, a website that provides an alternative to the corrosive progressivism of The Boston Globe, where I worked a long time ago.

He was introducing himself to subscribers, and in doing so brilliantly and succinctly explained what I try to explain at greater and sometimes lugubrious length. Please read on:

“There are two kinds of bias in news. The first is where a reporter or editor (or both) skew facts, distort quotes, misinterpret sources, and engage in other sins of commission or omission to present a picture at odds with reality in order to advance an agenda or keep some other agenda from advancing.

“(Sound familiar?)

“That’s the sort of bias we hope to avoid. Our standards in reporting the news are truth, honesty, fairness. Being fallible, we’ll fall short of them. But we aim high.

“The second type of bias is in the selection of news. What constitutes a story? What makes one event newsworthy, and something else not? Why do some things get in the paper and others don’t? This is the sort of bias we not only admit to; we embrace it.”

That distinction applies to WORLD as well. We try to avoid bias one and we embrace bias two, with maybe one difference from the NewBostonPost.

McDonald writes:

“In this world there is no such thing as a purely ‘objective’ presentation of what happened. Everybody has a perspective on something, shaped in some way by our beliefs and experiences. So everybody has some bias.”

Agreed, with the words “In this world” being crucial. The Bible was written by people with biases, but our understanding that it is “inspired” means that in essence it comes from out of this world.

The four Gospels, for instance, have four different perspectives, but they (and all the other books of the Bible) are objective truth in that they come from God. He is the only one who knows the world objectively.

So, WORLD aspires to be a Biblically objective publication, but since everyone on the staff (and most of all me) is a fallen sinner, we always come up short.

God bless the NewBostonPost.