Three meaty posts on Cut on the Bias today.

A guest poster gets right to the heart of the problem of boring newspapers:

"Journalists frequently take subjects that are immensely fascinating and render them as he-said/she-said accounts that read like a 7th-grade schoolgirl's diary."

He also offers this tidbit:

"A well-known secret in D.C. is that the Washington Post employed one full-time environmental journalist at the start of Clinton's tenure, and when this person moved on the Post did not hire another. When it became clear that George W. Bush was the next U.S. President, they hired four reporters to cover the environment full time. You see, this topic is all about a Power Struggle between Industry and Gaia/The Children. As representatives of the former (another errant frame), Republicans will surely bring more conflict to the environmental arena, and that's all news is, right?"

This is the sort of bias I see most often. It is not that a particular story is willfully distorted (although that can happen). It is the selection of stories that are pursued. Thus, the New York Times goes all out on Martha Burk and Augusta National, but it finds the question of ANSWER's involvement in the peace marches uninteresting.

susanna then turns to this Kristof column and shows that while he recognizes that big media's ignorance of American evangelicals is a problem, his own knowledge of that community is profoundly limited.

One thing struck me while reading the Kristof piece. He notes that 46% of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or born-again. Then he comments "Yet offhand, I can't think of a single evangelical working for a major news organization."
How many other groups can you list that could be so under-represented at the NY Times without triggering a full-blown, code-red outreach/ recruitment effort.