I'm no defender of Lee Enterprises, as this week's column attests. But I usually defend the company, or at least the Gazette, from liberal bias charges. It's not that I think there is no liberal bias in the media, it's that I think the public perception is so wildly overblown that it would be closer to the truth to cavalierly dismiss all the allegations rather than try to sort through them.
But even I have a hard time defending this headline from Tuesday's Gazette. Does the story back up this remarkable claim? Not in the least. Rehnquist defends the right of judges to decide for themselves whether to recuse themselves from cases. If he defended the right of judges to be biased, it didn't show up in the six paragraphs that made it into the paper.
The headline is accurate on its face. People do have a right to be biased. But judges have no right to let that influence their legal decisions. And copy editors shouldn't let bias influence the headlines they write.