Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the New York Times, shares some thoughts about bias — real or imagined.

An excerpt:

“Throughout this election season, most of the thousands of messages I have received about Times news coverage have alleged bias — bias in headlines, photo selections, word choices, what the newspaper chooses to write about and what it ignores, what it puts on Page 1 and what it puts inside. Most of the complaints, but by no means all of them, have come from the right. Nobody acknowledges the possibility that, because of their own biases, they could be reading more, or less, than was intended into an article, a headline or a picture. Many go a step beyond alleging mere bias to accuse The Times of operating from a conscious agenda to help one candidate and destroy the other.”

Hoyt also notes: “There is an entire body of scholarship devoted to what social scientists call the “hostile media” syndrome.”  

Who knew?