James Poniewozik makes an argument out of a point that I've long believed; centrism can be a form of bias. It's about coverage of American politics, but ask yourself whether the same effect plays out in this country.

From Time.com: (seen first at Twitter)

As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias — i.e., a preference for centrism — whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." (Moderate bias would also require me to find a countervailing liberal position and pretend that it is equivalent to global-warming denial. Sorry.)

Often, moderate bias is just the result of caution, but the effect is to bolster centrist political positions — not least by implying that they are not political positions at all but occupy a happy medium between the nutjobs. Meanwhile, conservatives see moderate bias as liberal, and liberals see it as conservative — letting journalists conclude that it's not bias at all. (See TIME's special report "Obama After a Year: What's Changed, and What Hasn't.")

Moderate bias also grows from a related phenomenon: status-quo bias. Journalists, like anyone, have a built-in bias toward believing that what was true yesterday will be true tomorrow. Establishment news outlets grow cozy and comfortable with other establishments. One reason some journalists insufficiently questioned the run-up to the Iraq war and underestimated the housing bubble was that they listened to their usual, credentialed sources — and the history of the past decade is the history of the experts being wrong. (See TIME's photo-essay "A Photographer's Personal Journey Through War.")

And especially in the top ranks of journalism, there's class bias. If I wanted to look at potential conflicts of interest in reporters covering bank bailouts, for instance, I'd be less concerned about their party affiliation than whether they're based (like me) in New York City, where the economy lives and dies on finance. ...

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1934550,00.html#ixzz0W5OGLnTo

American politics has civil libertarians and Wall Street conservatives and social-justice moralist-populists and much more.

And they all, in these unsettled times, have various issues with the centrist establishment — which has its own permutations and camps. All of this promises wild and interesting times for journalists to cover, but they won't be able to do it from the neutral center. Because there isn't one, and there never was.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1934550,00.html#ixzz0W5Oa34YI