NPR

I listen to National Public Radio. Every morning, when I come down to fix my kids breakfast and pack lunches, and brew coffee, I turn it on. I have listened to it at the exclusion of most every other radio station for most of the last 15 years of my life (save  a brief stint in the late 90s, living in New Haven, when I listened to Hot97... my nascent hip-hop years).

I listen to NPR because it's the best news on the radio. It's comprehensive, it's thorough. I also like NPR because it's liberal.

Of course it's liberal. Everyone knows NPR is liberal. NPR claims to tell both sides of the story and they often do--that fact preserves their professional obligation to maintain journalistic integrity. But NPR is not liberal because of the way they share the news, they are liberal because they are liberals sharing the news. The subtlest cues give the listener an understanding that the voices on their airwaves who are presenting the balanced information are voting Democratic. It's the choice of stories. It's inflection in the voices. It's cultural cues. It's the fact that they are based on the coasts. You just know that this "balanced" information is being balanced by liberals.

What's interesting to me about the James O'Keefe/NPR dust-up is that O'Keefe manages (again, damn him!) to expose liberal weak spots. The ACORN piece was bizarre and strange, but it did manage to show that liberal groups have not always managed to make a strong case for the importance of personal behavior. With respect to NPR, O'Keefe has raised questions about whether liberals properly own their biases.

We liberals love to believe that we're "open-minded" and "inclusive" in our ways of thinking. But we have profound biases and (like all people) we have a proclivity toward being judgmental about our fellow human beings. Even though the NPR staffer who disparaged Republicans and Tea Partiers was a fundraiser and not a newsperson (and thus the incident should not raise questions about NPR's journalistic standards), O'Keefe still managed to hit the mark by drawing a tangential connection between the avowedly "unbiased" news outlet and one of its clearly biased employees.

What's the lesson? I think you've got to own your biases. Life is a journey to learn our own blind spots. We can never presume that a particular method of doing our job can somehow prevent our internal opinions and biases from being expressed. Our preferences, our loves, our fears are expressed so subtly that we can never expunge them from our work--especially when our work uses language as its primary tool. Maybe a mechanic can do their work without revealing bias... but not a journalist.

Objectivity for people who use language in their profession--journalists, teachers, clergy--is a dangerous ruse. Own--and constantly examine--your biases. Defend them, if you have to. But never pretend that you don't have them.