Possibly because neither of you ever worked as a journalist at an actual newspaper. I did so for 10 years.

While there are indeed standards, and there is indeed the stated goal of objectivity, those standards are not written down anywhere, and one person's "objective and balanced" is frequently another person's "biased and slanted."

The real problem, however, lies in the fact that no matter how objective a person attempts to be, they bring their own point of view to everything they cover. There is no intent not to be objective, but subjectivism happens -- you ask soft questions of the politician you like, and hard ones of the politician you dislike. You, on purpose or by accident, pick the higher-quality quotations from one person, and poorer ones from another (I've seen this happen to the poorly articulate G.W. Bush a lot during his campaigns -- he could speak eloquently for 15 minutes, and botch one line, and the botched line would be the quoted one). Even this wouldn't be a problem, however, if newsroom populations were less politically uniform. In an Associated Press survey done a couple of years ago, 95 percent of all newspaper reporters and editors identified themselves as Democrats, and something like 90 percent of those described themselves as liberal Democrats. To think that the newsrooms are staffed to the gills with liberal Democrats, but that news coverage is balanced and not biased in favor of liberal Democrats, requires a high degree of bemusement.

The bias is there -- one reason for Fox News financial success was that it honestly didn't have to be biased in favor of conservatives to fix itself a place in the industry. It only had to be less biased in favor of liberals than the rest of the TV newscasts, and it succeeded in that.

I suppose my point is that all journalism is a human endeavor. It can only approach a perfection it can never achieve. The standards and objectivity I was taught to practice in journalism schools informed my work, certainly, but it didn't make me any less the person I was when I began the profession, and it certainly didn't change the hearts and minds of those people who identified themselves as Democrats and Liberal Democrats who provided the majority population of most newsrooms.