Everybody’s getting into the media-criticism act these days! We at Various Things & Stuff try to keep the daily papers honest because that’s our job — even though we’re owned by the same folks who put out the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a frequent target of our critiques.

But today, our good friend and colleague Jon Ralston got media-crit fever, and went all medieval on the ass of one Tom Mitchell, editor of the R-J. (Full disclosure: Mitchell was our former boss during our five-year tenure as the R-J’s political columnist.)

It seems Mitchell had lowered the boom on the Las Vegas Sun, which has, since Oct. 2 been inserted into the daily R-J. How, Ralston wonders, can this be, given that the R-J is just as biased?

We’ll get to that in a moment. For now, let’s take Mitchell’s assertions and criticisms one by one.

Mitchell Assertion No. 1: “Yet journalists hold up the concept [objectivity] as holy writ. For a newspaper that is trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, objectivity is a worthy and laudable goal.”

Sure, in the same way that humans sprouting wings and flying is a worthy and laudable goal, which is to say, a silly and totally ridiculous goal that everybody knows will never be met. It is impossible for any thinking human being to be objective, which is why scientists had to create their famous scientific method. Applied to journalism, objectivity often results in stores so boring they can be used as general anesthetics at hospitals. (Why do you think UMC orders so many copies of the R-J? It ain’t for the comics, baby.)

So we should all be biased? No. But the best thing any daily newspaper reporter can do while covering the news is be fair, which means honestly representing the views of all the people who are subjects of the story, telling the truth when setting out the issues and giving each quoted source a fair chance to be heard. A fair story might very well come to some conclusion, while an “objective” story will not.

And this part of Ralston’s criticism rings true: The R-J itself is not objective, and often doesn’t try to be. You want specific proof? We thought you might. Here you go:

• On June 26, 2005, a member of the R-J’s business staff, Jennifer Robison, wrote an incredibly biased piece that alleged businesses were not moving to Nevada due to the high taxes passed by the 2003 Legislature. She’s since written at least two follow-up pieces about companies that moved here because of the low taxes. Was she wrong then, or was she wrong when she wrote those follow-ups?

• On Sept. 16, 2005, medical reporter Paul Harasim wrote a story about Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins being escorted out of Desert Springs Hospital, allowing hospital officials to say in the lead that Perkins’ presence threatened the lives of patients. But if you read the whole story, you learned that allegation was baseless, and it’s undeniable that the newspaper knew it.

These were not objective stories; they were biased (and false). Yet they ran disguised as news. For Mitchell to profess objectivity as a goal with these two stories on the record is hypocritical. (To be fair, however, Mitchell did admit the paper often falls short of its objectivity goal.)

Mitchell Criticism No. 1: The Los Angeles Times was biased when it wrote a certain tax exemption “drained” millions from federal coffers. Does that not presume that the money belonged in the federal coffers in the first place? And does that not make sense, given that the money belongs to the taxpayers before it’s “drained” from their pockets to the government?

True enough: Reporters often assume that government programs are good, and that they ought to be funded. Since funding comes from taxpayers, they’re assuming a certain amount of wealth should be shuffled from a taxpayer’s pocket to the government’s. A more fair way to express the issue might be to discuss the funding in real-dollar terms, so readers can tell whether it’s a true “cut,” (i.e. the program is actually getting less money than the year before), a “reduction” (i.e. the program is getting less than was requested or expected, but more than the previous year in real dollars), or an “increase” (i.e. the program is getting more than the previous year, and how much more).

Mitchell Criticism No. 2: U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is ginning people up to write letters to the editor. Well, stop the presses to think that Nevada’s senior senator and master political game-player might not get constituents to try to argue his case in print. It seems Reid’s biggest mistake is not telling his many surrogate letter-writers to use their own words (Mitchell reports several letter-writers used the exact same Reid form-letter). And we’re willing to bet that this has been going on — on both sides of the aisle — for years.

But we think there might be a little bitterness here over a recent spate of R-J editorials criticizing Reid, and follow-up letters to the editor carrying the same message. It’s actually led Reid — according to our sources — to boycott the R-J, by refusing to return calls from the paper. (We at Various Things & Stuff believe that’s totally wrong; Reid is a public official, and he has an obligation to speak to the press, even press he thinks is hostile. End the boycott, Sen. Reid! In the end, it hurts you a lot more than the R-J.)

But the recent exchange, as Raslton noted, required the R-J to correct a line in a story that claimed Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen was “moving to distance Reid from a possible scandal.” In reality, the paper later admitted, Hafen “gave information about grants in response to questions.” (Read the whole thing for yourself.)

Mitchell Criticism No. 3: The Sun shills for pet family causes, like pet adoption and family businesses.

If he’s referring to the front-page abomination that was a Sun story on a deal between lasvegas.com (controlled by the Greenspun family) and Southwest Vacations, well, he’s absolutely right. It’s classic Sun strategy to shill for Greenspun corporate enterprises, whether it be development (American Nevada), their cable news network (Las Vegas ONE), a phone company (Nextlink), and even an abortive plan to put a racetrack on the Strip. And that’s just wrong. (Then again, it’s not unexpected. In an interview on Ralston’s Face to Face show recently, Sun President and Editor Brian Greenspun explained that his paper will write stories with the community interest at heart, and that community interest is often contiguous with the Greenspun family interest. )

Then again, the R-J has its problems, albeit not as egregious. The wraparound cover of the newspaper’s Friday editions contains ads for Stephens Books, owned by the Stephens Media Group. The difference is, that’s not considered editorial space, which means it’s unseemly, but not unethical. The lasvegas.com-Southwest Vacations story was purely, inarguably unethical.

How about a bias towards philosophical interests, rather than business interests? Ralston cites coverage of the 2003 Legislature — heavy on anti-tax stories — and the recent controversy over the proposed police contract — heavy on statistics showing true costs of the pact. We happen to think the 2003 Legislative coverage was slanted against the tax increase, although pointing out the costs of the police union package, while certainly not lending support to the measure, is fulfilling a newspaper’s mission to give the public the full story.

Now, we at Various Things & Stuff (and in the paper we get to oversee, CityLife, we don’t strive for unreachable goals, like objectivity. We indulge our biases, letting them guide us to stories and to the ways in which we cover them. But we do try to be fair. It’s just that some days, being fair means calling it like it really is, something that the quaint notion of objectivity would never allow. But that’s OK, since objectivity doesn’t exist in the real world anyway, save as a rhetorical spear that all too often turns into a boomerang. Like today.