Without a hint of bias, I can say that Santo Santoro is a tool.

I haven't read the Senate Estimates transcript yet. I'll get to it, but the gist is Santo hates the ABC. Santo complains that it is bias for the ABC to have a rule that they do not refer to Australian Troops as "our troops".

Santo claims this is "Orwellian", saying it is "perfectly feasable for an Australian broadcaster to refer to 'our troops' while still presenting balanced and objective reporting'..."(Crikey email, Monday, November 7.)

Santo is a tool who doesn't understand that a news organisation should not identify with any side in a conflict.

But it does bring in something that I've been thinking about and which I have a half-formed theory about. I read a lot of American stuff and there's the regular complaints about the left-wing bias of the media. But I never see anyone complaining about the right-wing bias of business. Or the female bias of the teaching and nursing professions. Or the male bias of the medical profession.

The point is, if you boil politics down to its most simplistic it comes out like this: small-l liberal/"progressive": likes new things; conservative: likes things the old way. Thus news, by virtue of the fact that its job is to tell people things they don't already know, is inherently liberal.

And the media will always be biased against the government, simply because the government (all governments) like to keep things hidden, and the job of the media is to find new things and tell them to everyone.