A few days before the 2012 presidential election, Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of Morning Joe on liberal MSNBC, proclaimed, “Anybody that thinks this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue … they’re jokes.” He felt reports that put Obama ahead were biased, and he had one particular culprit in mind, Nate Silver, a presumably liberal polling expert who calculated that President Obama had a 79 percent chance of beating Romney.

There was just one problem. It turned out to be Scarborough himself whose judgment was clouded by bias—as Silver recognized when he offered to bet the anchorman $1,000 on the outcome of the election, a wager Scarborough wouldn’t take. Silver turned out to be amazingly accurate in how he called the race.

That’s the problem with media bias. We all know it’s there, and we all know we need to see it, detect it, and overcome it if we’re ever going to know the truth, but we also all see it in different places. All too often, we think whoever we agree with is unbiased. It’s the other guy, the one we disagree with, who holds the biased opinion. How, then, are we ever to get at the truth, the truth we need, not only just to know what’s going on, but to be responsible citizens in a democracy?

It’s a very old problem, and it’s not about to go away, though there are definitely things we can do to try to smoke out biased reporting and see the facts more clearly. We’ll get to that later, but first, a little history. Bias in the media wasn’t always considered a negative. In fact, until about 100 years ago, it hardly ever occurred to anyone that media should be unbiased. Everyone agreed that an informed electorate was the basis of a free society, but they didn’t take that to mean that the news should be delivered without a point of view. They did agree, however, that in the U.S. the freedom of the press was sacred. That was a founding principle of our nation, and one of the great things that set us apart from every government that had come before.

The idea of a truly free press was born in 1735, when a New York newspaperman named John Peter Zenger was put on trial for libel for defaming the royal governor. Zenger’s lawyer insisted that he was innocent because what he had printed was the truth. No law at the time protected a journalist who told truth that hurt a public official, but the jury set Zenger free anyway—and established the notion of a press unafraid to speak truth to power as a cornerstone of liberty.

What makes the jury’s decision all the more intriguing is that it was quite well known that Zenger’s paper had been founded expressly to attack the royal governor. Freedom of the press was considered to be quite a separate matter from bias, as indeed it should be. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were awash in partisan newspapers and pamphlets. One of the British outrages that led to the Revolution was the Stamp Act—which put a tax on newspapers. In Europe the press had always been controlled by the ruling aristocracy and bent to serve its purposes; in the colonies, it became the weapon of the people, and publications like Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense fired the people to revolt against their overseas overlords. The only kind of media bias anyone really worried about was bias imposed from above, by the king and his men.

And so, when the Constitution was written its very first amendment stated “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”

With those words, a free press was enshrined along with freedom of speech and religion as one of our most crucial liberties. The government went well beyond mere words in supporting it, too. Where other nations heavily taxed their newspapers, the young United States did the opposite. It subsidized them. The Postal Act of 1792, which established the nation’s mail service, gave newspapers discounted postage rates, and legislators often provided funding for papers in their districts.

With that help the American press flourished so much that by 1835 the U.S. had five times as many daily papers as the British Isles. However, high officials often hated and distrusted what the papers printed. In 1798 President John Adams went so far as to push through the notorious Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious” writings about the president or Congress. The law would backfire badly, turning its victims into free-speech martyrs. Thomas Jefferson got rid of the Sedition Act soon after he was elected president.

Not all bias is political bias. In the 1830s James Gordon Bennett used sensationalism and colorful embroidering of the truth to build his New York Herald into the biggest newspaper in the world. As but one lurid example, his paper described the corpse of a murdered prostitute in 1836 as follows: “The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”

Newspapers were, after all, businesses first, and the primary concern was selling papers. By 1871 a British observer would describe the typical American newspaper as “a print published by a literary Barnum, whose type, paper, talents, morality, and taste are all equally wretched and inferior; who is certain to give us flippancy for wit, personality for principle, bombast for eloquence, malignity without satire, and news without truth or reliability.”

How biased was the press in the 19th century? In 1860 Bennett’s Herald reported that Abraham Lincoln was “a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar.”

By the end of that century, the United States was a nation of mass-readership newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World led the way, with signs in its city room that read, “Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy! Who? What? Where? When? How? The Facts—The Color—The Facts!”

Despite the noble motto, in the World and in its archrival, William Randolph Hearst’s Journal, “there was a lot of willful omission and lying,” as Brooke Gladstone, media historian and host of the NPR show On the Media, points out in her book, The Influencing Machine. Hearst himself is best remembered for his (possibly apocryphal) 1897 telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, who told him there was no fighting in Cuba to report on: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

The tide began to turn with the century. Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896 and announced that it would henceforth “give the news … impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest involved.” Lack of bias became a new ideal in the Progressive Era of the early 1900s. In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer endowed one of the first journalism schools, at Columbia University, to “raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession,” and others soon followed. In 1922 editors founded their first professional association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and drafted a code of ethics that declared, “News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.”

Balancing Act The Saturday Evening Post

How do you know you can trust what you read? Start by recognizing that there is no such thing as completely unbiased news. No one can report any news story without encapsulating complicated events, deciding what’s really important, leaving out what the reporter thinks are insignificant details, and adopting a point of view that makes it possible to stitch together all the elements and tell a story. Therefore no two people will ever report any news story the same way. So there is no such thing as a single objective telling of a news event. That said, the following tactics will bring you closer to the objective truth.

1. Triangulate from less biased sources. Fox News has a clearly conservative slant; MSNBC has a liberal one. Whatever news source you begin with, think about how hard that source tries to be unbiased.

2. Separate news from opinion. Always ask yourself whether what you’re getting is reporting or commentary. In newspapers the distinction is usually pretty clear. There’s news on the front page and commentary on the editorial page. On television and on the Internet, it’s often less clear. Sites like Drudge Report on the right and Talking Points Memo on the left report news, but from a definite point of view and with a lot of opinion mixed in.

3. Be suspicious. Always have your antennae out for anything that sounds untrue. If something you hear or read seems questionable, a simple Google or Google News search can often ferret out the truth. Factcheck.org, politifact.com, and snopes.com are good nonpartisan sites devoted to separating truth from fiction.

4. Balance your news diet. Try to get at least some of your news from the other side. Even if you feel strongly about an issue or a news event yourself, it’s vital to take in opposing positions. Somewhere between one extreme and the other usually lies the truth. But above all …

5. Recognize your own biases. The multiplicity of voices available to us today allows people to find news sources that consistently present the news the way they like it. This tends to strengthen people’s prejudices and make all of us even more polarized than ever. Try always to stay aware of this tendency in yourself. It’s there in all of us.

Only The Facts The Saturday Evening Post

In the 20th century, the car was king. State and federal road building programs and cheap, abundant energy opened up vast expanses of our country for people to explore, and sprawling suburbs for them to populate. However, today’s realities of congested highways, climbing fuel prices, and concerns over carbon emissions are changing the way many Americans think about transportation. Just as the highways prompted us to think big, these new factors are now encouraging us to think small: shorter commute times, less energy consumption, reduced pollution, and more efficient ways to get where we want to go. [See also: "The Looming Crisis in Mass Transit" from our Jul/Aug 2012 issue.]

The stage is set for a renaissance in public transportation. Simply put, we need to move away from the automobile as our primary means of conveyance. Today’s commuters are looking for a safe, clean, efficient, economical, and practical alternative to driving to work. Already public transportation systems in major American cities are experiencing near record ridership counts, creating a need for expansion of capacity and upgrading of both infrastructure and rolling stock. But we need to increase the scope and options for public transportation. Here’s why:

• Public transportation saves the equivalent of 4.2 billion gallons of gas annually—about 900,000 auto fill-ups a day, according to the American Public Transportation Association. If drivers shifted to public transit at the rate of 10 percent of their daily travel, the U.S. would reduce its dependence on oil imports by more than 40 percent.

• Public transportation systems cost less to build than highways. In an urban setting, a mile of freeway costs up to $50 million to build. The same mile of light rail can cost half as much and moves two to three times as many people.

So, why not just do it, to borrow the catch phrase of a famous sneaker company? Public transportation faces several obstacles to growth in this country. For example, federal highway funds are distributed to the states on an 80-20 basis—80 percent federal funds to 20 percent state funds. However, transit programs get federal funding for only 40 to 60 percent of the cost, depending on the project. That differential makes it very tempting for states to direct their resources to highways, where the federal share of the costs is much larger. And, when new rail projects run across state borders—and sometimes even county lines—the approval process can make funding well-nigh impossible.

Another obstacle is how deeply embedded car culture is in the United States. People made choices to move from the cities to the suburbs, from the efficiency of the public transportation system to the convenience of private, personalized transportation. Transit lost public support in many cities. For example, Los Angeles had one of the most extensive streetcar systems in the country, but the city chose to tear up the tracks and build freeways to accommodate the car. Across the country, public transportation came to be considered as a conveyance of the elderly, disabled, and poor. Federal funding for transit was looked upon as a social program rather than as a transportation program.

We have to move away from this post-World War II mindset, to transform our thinking, and link land use and development to transportation. Other countries already know the benefits of investment in public transportation. In Paris, increased transit has reduced automobile traffic by 25 percent, prompting the city to invest an additional $45 billion to expand its Metro system and remove even more cars from city streets.

As chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, I proposed a transformational surface transportation program that would have invested $99.8 billion in public transportation over six years, and streamlined the approval process for transit projects. Unfortunately, the White House and Senate leadership did not think that the time was right to move such a comprehensive, and, yes, costly, transportation bill, and it stalled in the House. I believed then that such an investment was desperately needed. Today I believe it is needed even more.

Older transit systems in Boston, Chicago, New York, and other cities need rehabilitating. Most systems need expansion. It is up to the federal government, states, and local authorities to provide the dollars to upgrade these systems and reap the economic benefits they can provide.

Our nation has a rich history of visionary leaders with a strong commitment to public investment in transportation infrastructure. Will those who make decisions in Washington and the state capitals continue that tradition?

Only time will tell.

Jim Oberstar, D. Minnesota, served as a congressman for 36 years until 2011.

What Government Needs to Do The Saturday Evening Post