Reddit reviews The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, Completely Updated and Revised

Reading through your replies here, OP, I get the feeling that you're not really open to having your views on the subject changed at all. You're hammering a lot on the point that, sure, journalists might disproportionately vote for and donate to the Democrats, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their beliefs are detectable in their work. I get the uncomfortable feeling that you would not dismiss this behavior so lightly if journalists disproportionately voted for or donated to the Republicans.

But that's not really an argument. If you're looking for statistical studies proving bias, those are going to be very difficult to find, for the simple reason that "bias" isn't something that anyone can really quantify. That's one of the reasons that people tend to use data that's more easily measurable, i.e. the voting and donation records referenced above. For example, Federal Election Commission records from the 2008 election cycle show that, of the 255 journalists who donated to political campaigns, 91% of them did so for the Democrats. That's a little tough to ignore in any discussion of potential bias.

"But so what?" you might reasonably ask. "Just because someone's giving money to the Democrats doesn't mean they won't give the Republicans a fair hearing. Most people are honest and trying to do a good job."

Right. Most people are honest and trying to do a good job, which is one of the reasons why (as Tom Rosenstiel once wrote -- see below for why this guy is important) it's very difficult to get them to acknowledge they might be part of the problem. I would argue that nobody consciously sets out to provide biased coverage to the public, but when we talk about "bias," we're usually talking about things a lot more insidious and subtle than telling all of your readers to go vote for the guy you like.

I'll be blunt. I don't really think I'm going to change your mind here, but here are two things that I think are worth considering:

Here's something that I think will make a lot of sense to Redditors given the site's commentary over the 2012 election cycle. Michele Bachmann is a name I assume you know. If you don't, she's a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota. Most of Reddit, which appears to get the majority of its news off /r/politics and /r/worldnews, believes (not entirely without reason) that she is batshit crazy and a menace to society. Most of Reddit is also entirely unfamiliar with Bachmann's tenure in the House and could not recognize nuance if it had two hands, a telescope, and a guide dog:

• Yes, Bachmann is pro-life and voted against the DREAM Act and doesn't believe in global warming and thinks schools should have the right to teach creationism alongside evolution. Boo.
  
• At the same time, she also voted against raising Pell grant limits for students because she thought the federal student loan system in the States is irreparably broken and should be run as a nonprofit venture (and she has a point), and voted against the Wall Street bailout because she saw it as handing billions of dollars to an incredibly irresponsible industry (and she has a point there too).
  
  Yay for nuance. So Bachmann has, at various points, been on or off Reddit's "side" with respect to issues, like just about every single member of Congress, but /r/politics generally only knows about the times when she isn't.
  
  (Trust me, this will become important in a moment.)
  
  Anyway, Bachmann ran a brief campaign for president during the 2012 election cycle and, like other Republicans, campaigned for votes in Iowa during the Republican primaries. Let's go back to August 2011 and examine the Ames Straw Poll. This isn't the actual primary, but the straw poll's still a useful glimpse at what voters think about the candidates. In the run-up to the straw poll, Bachmann got an absolutely insane amount of coverage in comparison to the other candidates, one of whom was Reddit's perennial favorite, Ron Paul.
  
  The interesting thing about this is that Bachmann and Paul are as different from each other as you can get while still technically being within the Republican party. While there are a few issues on which they share beliefs, they would take the country in very different directions were they ever elected. Ron Paul fans on Reddit were upset because Bachmann was getting all the coverage out of Iowa, and they felt like Paul was being overlooked. They were actually kinda right about that. Again, this is very difficult to quantify, but if you go back through summer 2011 news coverage concerning the Republican candidates, it will be instantly obvious that Bachmann dominated coverage before the Iowa primaries. She got the lion's share of national media attention, interviews, and editorials, with people alternately supporting her or wringing their hands over her status as a Republican figurehead because she's cray-cray.
  
  But then the Iowa Republicans conducted their first straw poll, and these were the results:
  
  
• Michele Bachmann: 4,823 votes, or 28.6%
  
• Ron Paul: 4,671 votes, or 27.7%
  
• Tim Pawlenty: 2,293 votes, or 13.6%
  
• Rick Santorum: 1,657 votes, or 9.8%
  
  And so on and so forth -- I don't think it's necessary to list them all.
  
  The most important part is that there wasn't really a statistically significant difference between Paul and Bachmann; Paul trailed her by a mere 152 votes, but Bachmann continued to dominate media coverage. In other words, Bachmann and Paul had equal levels of support from Republican voters in Iowa, but you would never know it from U.S. media coverage.
  
  So what gives? If Republican politicians with such hugely different views could be within ~150 votes of each other on the first significant poll of the election cycle, why was one of them getting so much more publicity than the other? For that matter, why was Bachmann being paraded as a Republican figurehead by the media when she had won only a slim plurality of the votes and not a majority?
  
  Was Bachmann really representative of American Republicans? Or was the media narrative of her as a Republican figurehead simply wrong? Does a Democrat-dominated media -- or at the very least, a media that is friendlier to the Democrats than the Republicans -- see Bachmann's views as the more easily sensationalized and exploited than Paul's?
  
  And here's our next example, in which I'm gonna point to someone else's words because he's someone we should really be listening to on the subject of media bias. Bill Dedman at MSNBC wrote an excellent article, "Journalists dole out cash to politicians (quietly)" examining this very subject. In that article, he quotes a writer and editor named Tom Rosenstiel. You may not recognize Rosenstiel's name right off the bat, but the guy literally wrote the book on modern journalistic ethics and the relationship between democracies and the "fourth estate." He is probably the single most read and quoted person in the world on the subject of journalistic ethics and the media's role in democracy and culture.
  
  Rather than quote everything he said in that article, here's a snippet: But giving money to a candidate or party, he said, goes a big step beyond voting. "If you give money to a candidate, you are then rooting for that candidate. You've made an investment in that candidate. It can make it more difficult for someone to tell the news without fear or favor.
  

The Elements of Journalism is a good place to start. The best way to learn how to write it is to learn how to read it. Find sources you trust, you know to be quality, and figure out how they put a story together.

>Who is to say who is & who is not a journalist anyway?

Who is to say who is and who isn't a professional in any field? If I make a blog in Wordpress, am I suddenly an IT engineer? If I floss, am I a dentist?

Why is it that people outside of word-based professions feel they can claim to be professionals, whereas no one does that with number-based professions? Is it because everyone uses language?

if you want to learn what journalism is, I suggest you start by reading these:

http://www.journalism.org/node/72

http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Journalism-Newspeople-Completely-Updated/dp/0307346706/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317881819&sr=8-1&tag=acleint-20

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Idiots-Guide-Journalism/dp/1592576702/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1317881819&sr=8-3&tag=acleint-20

http://www.amazon.com/Associated-Press-Guide-News-Writing/dp/0768919797/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1317881819&sr=8-8&tag=acleint-20

http://www.amazon.com/Journalistic-Writing-Building-Skills-Honing/dp/1933338385/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1317881819&sr=8-9&tag=acleint-20

http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/

This book was required reading, and it's quite good.

If they don't even get the purpose of journalism, have them read this:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Journalism-Newspeople-Completely-Updated/dp/0307346706

Excellent!! Thanks for that link. If you're interested in ethical journalism and the who, what, where, why and when of it, this is a really good book to own.

Some good resources are the Associated Press Stylebook, the Elements of Style, and The Elements of Journalism. The Elements of Journalism gives some good tips for journalists like objectivity and truth. Good luck in your studies.

Two of my perennial favorites, which I'll add to some of the terrific suggestions below:

• 'The Elements of Journalism' by Kovach and Rosenstiel. Great grounding in the essential principles of the practice. There's also a decade-old online supplement.
  
  
• 'The Influencing Machine,' a graphic non-novel by Brooke Gladstone, offering an easy-to-read overview of a lot of thinking about journalism and media, including a discussion of journalism's real biases.
  
  But besides those, much of the writing, especially on technology, gets old very quickly, so as other people have pointed out, books aren't always your best route. Get yourself into the social media conversation about journalism, where you'll find people like @romenesko and @jayrosen_nyu and many many other astute and intelligent commentators taking on the issues that are going to shape your career. But those two books are a solid foundation of the ideas underlying journalism.