Bias: You Can't Smell Your Own

I have yet to meet a liberal who actually sees liberal media bias. I can't even convince friends of mine who work in liberally biased mainstream media jobs that the problem exists. Casually passing by a radio this morning, I heard NPR's Cokie Roberts illustrate the phenomena perfectly. This is a direct quote from Cokie's analysis of Congressional political strategy:

So, you know, Republicans who might have wanted to keep the economy bad to skewer the Democrats are now worried it could affect them and it could affect some of their key constituents, and they're not so sanguine about just letting it get worse. And Democrats who wanted to just, sort of, demagogue against Republicans on Medicare cuts are worried it might all backfire.

I'll give you that her cynicism extends to the Democrats in this statement, so I'm sure in her view this is balanced. I'm sure politicians from either side would indeed allow people to suffer a prolonged recession to advance their own narrow interests, but the statement relies on these assumptions:

1) That the Democrats have policies that would improve the economy quickly.

2) The Republicans know that if only they enacted these Democrat-advanced policies, the economy would improve.

Maybe if there were an editor or even a mailroom employee at NPR who was politically to the right of Al Gore...