I began (and ended) my newspaper career at a newspaper who, until the mid-seventies proudly printed the emblem of the state's democratic party on their front page every day. The fact that the newspaper had been started and initially funded by democrats was not only not a secret, it was actively promoted there on the front page, every day. At this same newspaper, 20 years later, the editor claimed that the newspaper served as a kind of glue that held the community together, that created the sense of community by providing everyone with a common set of facts that served as the foundation for effective and democratic public discourse.

In 20 years, the newspaper went from proudly boasting of its democratic party origins to claiming a sacred place as the primary provider of information to the community of unbiased news and information. What is the cause of the change in perspective? I suspect a significant contributor to the change in perspective was that during the seventies, it was a two-newspaper town. The afternoon paper was known as the conservative paper and the morning paper, the democratic paper, was the liberal one. In the meantime, the afternoon newspaper had disappeared and, much as was happening in markets all over the country, most towns were becoming one newspaper towns.

There is a high degree of correlation between the monopolistic positions of newspapers and the stridency with which newspapers claim to be unbiased arbiters of factual information. In other words, the argument against bias is a rationalization that serves to defend the lack of diversity of news sources within a community.

This will make perfect sense to economists and marketing professionals. When there is a highly competitive market, firms tend to compete by differentiating their product, by selecting niches within the market to serve. The more competition there is, the smaller the niche that is served. The fact that newspapers considered it the civic responsibility of everyone in town to read them serves as a good indication of the degree of competition taking place in the market.

The Internet represents a flowering of competition for newspapers -- from competition for advertising dollars to competition for people's time and as a source of information. At the same time, many journalists lament the fact that there is a disturbing trend toward media consolidation, a death of diversity within markets. Feeling competitive pressures, newspapers have become even more vociferous in their claim to be an unbiased source of information. It's a claim intended to preserve their monopolistic position in the marketplace.

Interestingly enough, the current trend in readership and circulation decline did not start in the mid-nineties with the advent of the Internet. The long slow slide started in the early seventies and continues to this day. It could very well be that the lack of diversity, the lack of different points of view, the lack of bias itself is the cause of the lack of interest in newspapers.

The idea that having one source of unbiased information is better than having two sources of information from two different perspetives is an interesting one, because there are other democratic institutions that contradict this model. In fact, there is another democratic institution that, much like the news media, is charged with finding the truth and getting it put on the record. This instution is the courts which is based on an adversarial system where one lawyer defends the accused against the prosecutions of the state.

No-one wants an unbiased lawyer, of course. We want an advocate of our position. The system works (imperfectly, of course) as effectively as it does because it is believed that the defendent gets a fairer trial when the defendent is allowed to argue his case, and when the jurors are allowed to see both sides of the story. An adversarial system, in this context, is viewed as more fair, meaning that the proper verdict will be reached more often compared with other systems of justice.

Think about it. Would you rather be tried in the press, or in a court of law?

Being an advocate, articulating a point of view, is a good thing. My former publisher and boss, someone for whom I have a great deal of respect, always said that the role of the free press is to "give voice to the voiceless." This is an admirable perspective, but it is not an unbiased perspective. And that's ok.