Armstrong Williams isn't that different from other journalists. We all hide our biases. I have no doubt that someone carefully selected Mr. Williams over Molly Ivins for that job not only for his race but also because of Williams' genuine sympathy for Bush's programs. Writers are paid for their particular biases, not despite them, and often for their ability to consistently conceal them. News anchors like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw build their careers upon carefully-preserved illusions of balance. We don't learn what anchors really think until they use their reputations for fairness to sell all the books they write in retirement about their pent-up biases.

The fuss over the bias recently “discovered' in the Pentagon's Balkan website seems a little silly in retrospect; it did, however, shed light on America's journalistic innocence, and clarified the legal limits of deceptive government propaganda. But of course that website was biased. Just as every other website is, along with all reporting in every medium. Every offering from the Pentagon is biased, as is every presidential press briefing, every word of anyone's testimony before Congress, every word from both parties, every story in every newspaper–in fact, every opinion on every issue that's ever been discussed. To be human is to be biased.

Writers with the most interesting biases are often the best-rewarded. A writer with a reputation for balance isn't unbiased. Fairness suggests instead that a writer has honestly and thoughtfully acquired a worldview which consistently informs and shapes her characteristic responses to, say, breaking news. Even the subject matter writers are drawn to reflects their biases. Like everyone else, writers enjoy being right; we just know how to be subtle about it.

Whenever I'm offered a statement or a “fact,” I wonder, “Sez who?” Most of us judge a story unbiased if it doesn't lean too far away from the way we see things, but we often overlook all the bias supporting what we already believe. Each of our unique worldviews finally comes down to who and what we choose to believe. There are no agreed-upon sets of facts, except perhaps a few scientific ones. The most robust worldviews are shaped slowly by open young inquirers who earnestly try to get “reality” right. No one ever gets reality right, by the way; but some worldviews do turn out to be more comprehensive or interesting than others.

In order to keep on living, we all make tentative assumptions, believe some “facts” offered us, but it's worthwhile to remind ourselves that nearly everything we think we know is acquired second-hand. The only thing we ever know for sure is that none of us knows anything for sure, because none of us has ever been everywhere and everyone, experiencing everything as it happens (that would be a definition of God.) An unbiased viewpoint on anything is an impossibility. Peter Jennings' perspectives would seem alien in most parts of the world.

What journalists/bloggers/pundits/writers can strive for, since objectivity is not possible, is to offer readers more of ourselves. As we strive like frenetic chameleons to adapt to this rapidly altering planet, we can offer our eyes and ears, our minds and hearts, our most honest reactions, questions, considerations, conclusions, and perspectives, all of which become, in the process, ever more unique, nuanced, colored, flavored, touched, persuaded, molded, bent, impressed, swayed, influenced, moved, convinced … biased.