Journalists do not need an ideological bias to misreport the news. Their simple preference for a good story by itself can lead to error. Just look at environmental reporting. Any nut with a placard can proclaim the End of the World, and reporters will snicker. A nut with a PhD. does the same, and it becomes Page One material.

Thankfully, at least nine out of ten apocalypses have proven wrong.

But you don't have to talk about the end of the world to hype something. . . .

There's less crime than "the well-informed" think there is, for instance. Reporters report the exceptional, but news viewers see these exceptions as the rule, with crime endemic. Thankfully, this is something that John Stossel repeatedly reminds his viewers. Few other journalists do.

Similarly, a recent study has shown that journalists, by concentrating on the biggest spending electoral races, encourage widespread misperception. In a survey conducted by social scientists at MIT and Stanford, it was found that "people with less education (and thus lower tendency to read newspapers) had, on average, the most accurate estimates of the average amount of money spent in politics and the relative importance of interest groups."

Informed readers' opinions on the subject, on the other hand, closely tracked the lopsided reporting they'd been exposed to. They over-estimated the impact of corporate and PAC money; their estimates of amounts spent on campaigns was over seven times that actually spent.

So, on average, the people in the nation with the most accurate view of politics are the least informed. At least on this issue.

Undoubedtly some reporters are so upset by politicians shilling for political investments that they deliberately over-report the top-spending races. But money can't but help be a story, as Hollywood and business reporting indicates. So simply by "going for the story," journalists (biased or not) contribute to a grossly distorted vision of modern political reality.

This is not to deny that journalists are, on average, biased to the left. I've recently argued that this is indeed the case. The evidence is in, and settled. But the extent to which the news gets skewed without conscious attempt is at least as important a problem.

It is also worth considering that journalists become dupes in their own game. Because their job demands concentrating on the exceptions, these exceptions not only skew the news, and the views of news consumers, they skew the views and ideologies of journalists themselves. Journalists come to think the problems that they've hyped are hyper-important, and understandable only in the way they've mis-framed them.

A similar logic may play into another source of journalistic bias, a kind that doesn't come from a set of "values" imbibed from tracts and myths and Renaissance weekends. Pure economic interest ? which many journalists see as the scourge of politics ? may infect journalists, too.

The Mean(ing)s of Production

Not long ago I read an AP story about a new study on term limits. I immediately judged the study's conclusions as rash and unwarranted. But then I read the actual study, and it turned out not that bad, actually. Not as bad as the article, anyway.

In Arizona there's this non-profit organization called ThinkAZ. The group published a study of legislative term limits, which Arizonans passed overwhelmingly years ago. The limits have begun to take effect, and are having some predictable results. Old-timers are being shown the door. Newcomers are coming in. So what does ThinkAZ think?

Well, after a lot of hemming and hawing and hedging, the report concluded that "experience" in the legislature is levelling out, and only what it calls "leadership tenure" has shrunk. In everyday terms, that means that the legislative leadership today is less hidebound and entrenched than it was before the limits ? that is, it's not far from what term limit advocates wanted all along.

But I didn't learn much of this in the AP story. That news account, instead, devoted most of its space to quoting lobbyists and long-term politicians on just how bad term limits were. Colorfully. Great quotes, all very negative to term limits.

So, a study of term limits paints a pretty rosy (or at least innocuous) picture of life under term limits. And a professional journalist paints that picture in as stark and dark terms as possible. Why?

It's not an isolated case, as I've often noted in my Common Sense e-letter. This is standard practice in journalism today: quote a few good sources over and over, and write the story to reinforce the value of the sources quoted. Continued...