Why do news orgs have to be "balanced," anyway? I see nothing wrong with a media outlet being obvious about which way they lean politically. It's simple to be blatant left or right. Nothing to hide.
The responsibility is on the consumer to gather and analyze the information. If you don't like the Daily Kos, don't read it. If you don't like Rush Limbaugh, don't listen to him.
The sham are the information producers that claim they are fair and balanced or say their opinions are restricted only to the op-ed section and believe their news stories are objective.
Since humans have emotions, it's impossible for a media person or organization to be objective 100 percent of the time. Objectivity is an unattainable goal. So don't try. Just pick a side, admit it, and build a business around it. Strong, one-sided, and well-crafted opinions sell. The mushy attempt to be objective is bland, dishonest, and intellectually insulting to consumers.
In its short time, the Huffington Post is successful. Would they be this successful if they tried to be objective or tried to give so-called fair time to every side of an issue?
A consumer can find "equal time" or "balance" on an issue by consuming more than one information source.
March 2006 Slate story How opinion journalism could change the face of the news
Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult of objectivity?
Objectivity - the faith professed by American journalism and by its critics - is less an ideal than a conceit. Journalists who claim to have developed no opinions about what they cover are either lying or deeply incurious and unreflective about the world around them. Nobody believes in objectivity, if that means neutrality on any question about which two people somewhere on the planet might disagree.
Most of the world's newspapers, in fact, already make no pretense of anything close to objectivity in the American sense. But readers of the good ones (such as the Guardian or Financial Times of London, to name the most obvious English-language examples) come away as well-informed as the readers of any "objective" American newspaper. Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism because it doesn't have to hide its point of view. Writers freed of artificial objectivity can try to determine the whole truth about their subject and then tell it whole to the world.
Abandoning the pretense of objectivity does not mean abandoning the journalist's most important obligation, which is factual accuracy. In fact, the practice of opinion journalism brings additional ethical obligations. These can be summarized in two words: intellectual honesty.