Pit stops on the way to objectivity
Daniel Okrent, public editor of The New York Times, recently wrote a column about bias at The Times. A letter writer reminds him that a previous Times editor addressed the subject years ago. He quotes him here (registration required).
I won't quote the whole thing, but essentially it outlines the three key decisions the newspaper makes before publishing a story. At each point, judgment is injected. It is on the money, except that I'd add a fourth decision, which comes at the very beginning of the process: whether even to pursue the story.
