Howard Kurtz reported this morning on the Washington Post’s experiment with self-criticism. Each day, the Post allows a different group of staffers to send around an e-mail critiquing the previous day’s edition. Book World editor Marie Arana had this to say when it was her turn:

On Thursday, Book World Editor Marie Arana, noting that she had been “a Young Republican at 15, a marching SDSer at 20, and roundly disgusted by the blue-team, red-team political dialogue by the time I turned 30,” criticized an article on what was called a “stealth evangelism” festival by saying: “The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.”
Downie says he is concerned if some staffers are openly displaying political preferences but that Arana’s comments were valuable and “made clear that we do have a diverse staff when it comes to ideological backgrounds.”

Such a criticism is certainly worth highlighting, but I don’t want to sound like I’m gloating when, in fact, the criticism came from a Post staffer in a Post-sponsored critique and was reported by Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. I would like to say this: Maybe it’s not a bad thing that the Post is a liberal newspaper. Maybe most Post readers like it that way. My problem is the Post’s pretense of objectivity — the notion that what is reported in the Post is there because “it’s news” or because “it happened”, when clearly there are agendas driving story selection and tone.

Stories like Kurtz’s today are one more step toward the transparency that big media needs to achieve in order to take bias out of the equation. Until then, and backed up by such critiques as Marie Arana’s, we should not let the Post hide its political agenda behind a “just-the-facts” fa