My grandfather the Rear Admiral (ret.) Joel Parks would complain to my father that the New York Times was too liberal and too influential, and he stuck to the San Diego local paper, which was staunchly conservative in those days, San Diego being a dusty Navy town with an Air-Force base and a small college. My father, his son-in-law and a bearded Jewish academic from New York, was the only one who was willing to disagree with him. He’d say “The NYT is influential because it’s the best paper in the country, and you should read it.” The admiral liked that. Nobody else engaged with him and he was terribly lonely.
I think about that when I read up on suicide, the abstinence-only “education” our kids get these days, and the particular approach of personal essays about HIV that the paper chooses. Those topics are hard to cover objectively, and no matter how they are covered, the right is probably going to shriek about bias whenever they’re discussed.
Now, I’m not as mindful about bias when I read up on household-junk hoarding and animal hoarding, because, dammit, that’s just cool. Still, mental illness is another topic that I tend to follow — obsessively, perhaps? — and one prone to real or percieved biases in coverage.
Secretly Ironic 