[chc]

I don't think this is really true, and I think it's a dangerous perspective to hold because it excuses biased journalism as "honest." It is entirely possible to present facts in a fair and even-handed manner. These facts may ultimately favor one party over another, but this does not make the journalist's position partial or editorialized.

[nostrademons]

It's only possible when you're able to report all the facts. If this was the case we would have no need for journalists, we'd all go straight to the original source. As soon as you need to choose a subset of facts to present, you have to choose which subset, which introduces bias. And remember that a fact is something like "When we MRI'd this subjects head under these conditions, this is the image that resulted", not "Scientists believe that wearing tin-foil hats causes cancer."

Take global warming, for example. Many media outlets seek to present an "unbiased viewpoint" on that issue by reaching out to climate-change deniers in addition to climate-change scientists who believe in global warming. But that ignores the fact that climate-change scientists who support global warming outnumber climate-change scientists who deny it by something like 400:1. But that ignores the fact (principle, actually, technically this isn't a fact) that science isn't decided by majority vote, it's decided by looking at the data and the evidence.

The actual facts in the global warming debate is that we've recorded these temperatures at these locations across the globe, and they appear to be rising over the last century. But that's not what people are interested in: the "story" is "Are humans causing it? What can we do about it? What will happen next?"

[bokonist]

"The actual facts in the global warming debate is that we've recorded these temperatures at these locations across the globe, and they appear to be rising over the last century."

To be clear - the only fact involved is the measurement of at a particular time at a particular station. The temperature of the world as a whole, and trend in temperature over a century, is a matter of interpretation and analysis, not pure fact. All sorts of statistics needs to be applied to clean the data, adjust for changes in station location, adjust for the growth of urban heat islands, etc. To see an example of the debate over these adjustments - http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/26/nasa-giss-adjusting-the-a... - changes in adjustments can have a large impact on the resulting graph.