What's Your Bent?

Once I was asked this by a Boy Scout troop leader.
"What's you bent?" she asked me in front of a gaggle of little boys in our newsroom.
"Uh, what do you mean?" I asked her. "You mean do I have an angle? A bias?"
"Yes, a bias," she said.

Fine. So in front of a crowd of Boy Scouts and their leaders, I attempted to explain how a reporter tries to maintain objectivity. Ahem, ah ha. But some of us do. And some of us just pretend we do. Take, for instance, CNN.com today. Its front page contains these first few lines: "Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000 American lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported Wednesday that he found no evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991."

Bias, fo sho.
In the everyday way we we puzzle things together, probably even more so than in the more obvious Faux News-style bias, we nearly always reveal a bent. The degree to which you bend is what you need to watch. Anything that requires propping up or head tilting is too much bent. CNN, you are like a sunflower today, and the sun is at 2 o'clock.