by Ivanhoe
A&E Editor

As a student, I take my education seriously.

I’m here to challenge myself to become a more thoughtful and educated person. I take a little friendly jibing from people because I love doing research, but I think research is where I have the most control over my own education. Rather than reading textbooks and parroting the information back to my professors, I’m out learning about what I am interested in, and drawing my own conclusions.

So, when it comes to politics, I have a similar philosophy. I want to find the most unbiased, factual news out there so that I can draw my own conclusions about the issues.

But does unbiased media exist?

The more polarized partisan rhetoric becomes in America, the more we hear people decry the media as biased one way or another. The mainstream network news gets it from both ends; conservatives complain about their liberal “Hollywood” bias, while liberals rally against their conservative “corporate” leanings.

I personally believe it’s a combination of the two: they try to distill the news into a flashy “Hollywood” format in order to get the ratings their corporate sponsors demand. As such, it becomes so watered down as to be neither liberal nor conservative—and, in fact, neither biased nor news.

In fact, I don’t believe that the people want unbiased news at all. Their habits of consumption show quite the opposite. Polarizing types like Al Franken and Ann Coulter make a killing off of books and programming that deliver divisive, knee-jerk rhetoric and very little in the way of content.

Even as an unashamed left-wing, pinko socialist, I don’t like talking politics with people who only get their news from Air America and Mother Jones any more than I do with those who get it from KVI and Fox News.

In fact, I wish my fellow liberals would better understand that there is nothing inherently evil about being a right-wing conservative.

Political beliefs are based on very broad general assumptions about human nature, and value judgments that have no definitive answer. What should taxpayer money be spent on? Can business be trusted to regulate itself? Does life, and the responsibility to defend it, begin at conception, birth, or at some other point? These are all matters of opinion that hinge on the nebulous concept of what is “fair” or “right.”

Everyone is making the blind leap of faith that their answers are just. Even the greedy and the lazy justify their belief that they have the right to be greedy or lazy, even if it comes at someone else’s expense, because of how they define the question of what is fair.

Because bias is values-based, and we live in a democratic society where we are free to develop our own values, I think that bias in the media is good. The best way to deal with bias in the media is to get information from a variety of sources.

Here’s where I go: For basic facts, I read print and Internet sources, such as The New York Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, edition.cnn.com, and www.timesonline.co.uk, and even www.foxnews.com, all of which report on different issues, depending on their bias. The trick is to read for what is factual and ignore the spin.

To hear the debate, I turn to public affairs television. C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2 bring us the complete U.S. House and Senate proceedings, a great many press conferences, panel discussions, and in-depth interviews from all across the political spectrum. TVW does the same for state politics, with the addition of Washington State Supreme Court hearings.

Another great source is public television and radio. Both PBS and NPR have well-produced programming that brings national and local news to their listeners—not without bias, but with a plurality of bias.

Probably the hardest part of all is finding people who disagree fundamentally with my own politics, but are willing to carry on a respectful debate anyway. Being able to do so is perhaps the very reason we fought for freedom of speech in the first place.