As I was walking through Barnes and Noble earlier this week, I noticed a book by Nation columnist Eric Alterman, titled "What Liberal Media?" I picked it up but quickly put it back down. I'm sure Mr. Alterman is very sharp and intelligent, but I can't imagine anything refuting media bias, considering that organizations like the Media Research Center and many authors like Bernard Goldberg have documented this as a fact.

A few news stories this past month have been blaring with bias:

Alone, without any support from colleagues, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., is definitely taking a lot of heat these days for supposedly anti-homosexual comments – much like Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., regarding segregation.

With Lott, the bottom line is that he was trying to be nice to an old man on his birthday, and he didn't have his political guard up. Partisan politics took over and, as a result, his comments were twisted into a racism issue.

With Santorum, his comments were literally changed into something else. In the original, unedited interview, Santorum said, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."

No bigotry there. The man didn't even mention the word "gay" or "homosexual" – he was simply commenting on law and a legal case. But the edited version of the Associated Press story reported, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home. …" Next thing you know, activists and politicians are calling for him to resign from his senior positions.

What's even more interesting is that the reporter, Lara Jakes Jordan of the Associated Press, is married to Jim Jordan – a former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee official and is now the campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

I believe they call that a "conflict of interest."

Earlier this month, CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan wrote in the New York Times about the atrocities he witnessed on his visits to the CNN bureau in Baghdad throughout the '90s. About one incident, he said, "in the mid-1990s one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief."

Another example was a 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman who was captured by Saddam's secret police while they occupied her country. Jordan wrote that one of her crimes had been being interviewed by CNN: "They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home."

The news executive wrote that these stories "could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

Obviously, of course, these reporters could have been evacuated from Iraq and the stories reported. Yet, I suppose a bureau in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's reign was very valuable.

It's rather disturbing that a network such as CNN would hide these atrocities. Moreover, a question comes up as to why it didn't report the stories on its own network, instead of breaking them in the New York Times. Is there no respect for human life? Especially a life on your own news team?

These two examples of journalists failing to report the truth are disgusting. I wonder how Mr. Alterman would respond.