Neither balanced nor biased

Nation magazine columnist Eric Alterman is sick and tired of hearing about liberal media bias. He also rejects the idea that the media should be evenhanded in its treatment of the two major parties. Objectivity, he insists, is not the same as evenhandedness or neutrality. "Simple accuracy is what annoys so many conservative complainers," he writes. He concedes, however, that "from a social-science standpoint this assertion is almost impossible to prove." Without sympathy for Republicans, I'd think it impossible to prove by any standard. All media are physically limited and all decisions on how to fill limited space with information are subjective. Editors make personal choices on what's newsworthy that can't be described as objective. The most obvious example from this election cycle is the question of Hillary Clinton's e-mail. For Republicans and Trump supporters the irrefutable proof of media bias is the perceived refusal by the "mainstream" media to pay adequate attention to the email controversy,  much less attention equal to that paid to the Trump scandals his supporters deem irrelevant to the issues of this campaign. Could Alterman claim that the email scandal has received an objectively appropriate amount of coverage, or that it can be determined objectively to be less relevant than Trump's taxes or his fantasies of sexual conquest? In reality he shouldn't have to. It should not be a scandal that media entities, being private,  have self-interested, subjective agendas and are not public utilities with some statutory obligation to treat all political parties equally -- despite the occasional liberal Democratic call for the revival of the Fairness Doctrine. The news media has been partisan practically from the beginning and the public should accept this and act accordingly in the marketplace. If the media seems especially biased against Trump it may be because they fear that he or his supporters do see media as a public utility, the content of which should be determined by the electoral majority and its representatives, and are less concerned about fairness than with turning it into a propaganda tool for Trumpism. In that context private bias might be preferable.