If you will indulge me for a moment, I’d like to give you an illustration of what I think of as biased reporting. When I saw this story, I was just stunned.

A couple of years ago, I saw a story about a big traffic pileup because of a huge snowfall. There were apparently many vehicles caught up in this thing, people delayed, etc etc etc. This same year, there were a lot of stories about SUV’s being dangerous to other vehicles on the road, gas guzzlers, etc.

So, I see a story that is about the record snow and the story is about the traffic snarls in the town that occurred as a result of snow piling up.

At the end of the story, the very last sentence of this story was:

“Many of the vehicles involved were SUV’s”.

I wanted to hit my head against the wall. Why was that in there? What was the point? How may of the vehicles were SUV’s, what percentage? Did the SUV’s cause all of the accidents, or were they victims of the snowfall just as the other vehicles were? What was the point of that sentence?

The only point of that sentence, that I could figure, was that the reporter really doesn’t like SUV’s and wants everybody to drive a Prius. Or something.

Because it made no sense in the context of the story; it was not a bit specific as to the actual number of SUV’s, or the reason why this fact was important to the story, or whether the SUV’s were the CAUSE of all or any of the accidents.

That’s one way biased reporting gets sneaked in.