Last Sunday The News & Observer‘s public editor Ted Vaden wrote a familiar column in which he claimed that journalists are objective and people who claim there is a leftist bias are mistaken.

I say it’s a familiar column because I wrote a similar one in 1991 or 1992 in The Herald-Sun (I don’t subscribe to that paper so I can’t check the archives to find the exact date). I claimed in that column that journalists were moderates and middle-of-the-roaders and all this talk about liberal bias was hogwash. Boy, was I wrong.

As I made my turn from liberal to conservative about 1993, the liberal bias of even my own newspaper became painfully evident. As I wrote later, most journalists are like fish who have no idea they’re wet. That includes most journalists who stick to the “we’re unbiased” fiction, like Vaden and his boss, Melanie Sill. Remembering my own delusion, I have no doubt they are sincere in their protestations.

Any bias in The N&O, says Vaden, is in its choice of stories, not in their individual execution. Even if that were true, which it most certainly is not, is that any less reprehensible?

I’ve been tracking the number of preachy agenda stories in The N&O and they make up the bulk of non-breaking news: Global warming, green technology, biodiesel, multiculturalism, diversity, the homeless, rampant growth, mistreated illegal immigrants. For any editor to claim that pushing one world view is a benign approach to journalism is as revealing as it is disturbing.

Many a journalistic crime has been committed under the banner of “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” which Vaden uses to justify this kind of selective journalism.

To help mainstream journalism survive this kind of thinking, Steve Boriss of Washington University in St. Louis has some sage advice for mainstream journalists in his excellent blog, The Future of News. Journalists who, like me in the early ’90s, actually believe in the objectivity myth, should give it a read.

Here are his four suggestions (the brief characterizations are mine. Read Boriss’s full post here):

1. Learn your left from your right: Quit claiming that everyone else is wrong about bias.
2. Stop dissing your readers’ taste for sensationalism: Attraction to the morbid and sensational is human nature, so quit whining about it.
3. Correctly interpret the First Amendment: Journalists have no more First Amendments rights than anyone else.
4. Get out there and compete: Quit crying about losing readers and figure out how to compete in a non-monopoly environment.

Jon Ham, vice president of the John Locke Foundation, publisher of its newspaper Carolina Journal, worked at The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., from 1985 to 2007, serving as managing editor and director of digital publishing.