This Fox News slogan has been pretty well laughed off the face of the planet by now, but every once in awhile you come across another example of the odd ideas people have about bias and objectivity.

The first example is from Uncommon Descent, which claims that ScienceBlogs.com really isn’t about science, but is just a political attack site. Why? “I challenge you to show me a single scienceblog.com website that supports anything on the conservative side of the political spectrum.” The earlier part of the post might have given the impression that the complaint was about the /amount/ of political content, but really, it would all be OK if only the political content were more “fair and balanced.” The trouble–what if, as Colbert proposed, reality has a liberal bias? When you’re doing science, you can’t assume the results will come out in a fair and balanced way. On the other hand, note that some ScienceBloggers lean libertarian, i.e. Ed Brayton–though on the third had, no, their aren’t people who want to enact policies based on religious fundamentalism, which is pretty thoroughly undermined by science.

Second, less stupid but still puzzling example, from Susan Blackmore’s What Can the Paranormal Teach Us About Consciousness? which has as series of odd disclaimers:

I would love to be able to provide a fair and unbiased assessment of the evidence for psi and decide whether it exists or not…

These are some of the reasons why I cannot give a definitive and unbiased answer to my question “Are there any paranormal phenomena?” I can only give a personal and biased answer — that is, “probably not.”…

In a very similar essay at her website she uses the word “objective” to describe the problem. The main reason for this is that she had (1) tried to do psi research, and not gotten any results, and she (2) personally inspected the lab where what was supposedly the best psi research was going on and found evidence of badly designed experiments, even fraud.

Clearly, these things fall under the category of “evidence.” Maybe it can be argued that gathering evidence first hand is more emotional and therefore likely to be biasing than gathering it yourself… but people can get pretty biased in their interpretation of reports they’ve read, and evidence you’ve gathered is still evidence. Anyway, an interesting use of “bias” and “objective” to catalog.

See also this post where the issue of objectivity came up.