After decades of trying to claim impartiality, there have been several admissions lately by the media that they are indeed, biased.

Last August, Walter Cronkite said, "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal".

In May of 2003, according to CNSNews.com, Bob Zelnick, who spent 21 years at ABC News, "confirmed fellow former ABC News correspondent Peter Collins' contention that anchor Peter Jennings routinely attempted to insert his left of center editorial slant into correspondents' news copy".

In June of 2002, Andy Rooney told Larry King, "I'm consistently liberal in my opinions," and that he considers Dan Rather to be "transparently liberal."

And of course, former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg has written two best-selling books on the subject.

But the latest topper is this post by ABC News in their Weblog called "The Note". It completely jettisons any impartiality, and admits that it, and most reporters covering Washington have an agenda, and will slant their stories to fit it.

Hey, whatever happened to the conservative media bias mantra from November of 2002?

UPDATE: Speaking of which, Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, "You don't suppose that Eric Alterman might acknowledge all of this at some point, do you? Perhaps not--after all, God forbid that Alterman might have to confront and argue against any information that might interfere with book sales".

ANOTHER UPDATE (2/11/04): Dr. Bob Arnot has left NBC. The reason, according to the New York Observer? "Dr. Arnot called NBC News’ coverage of Iraq biased."

VERY LATE UPDATE (10/27/04): This is the big one, which I'm linking to this page for completeness.

VERY, VERY LATE UPDATE (5/26/06): I just came across this ten year old quote from ABC's Charlie Gibson; it certainly seems right at home here:

"I don't deny for a minute that I think that the basic political bent of most reporters is probably to the liberal side. Do, you know, do people try, David Brinkley always says there's no such thing as objectivity, there are just lesser degrees of subjectivity. Reporters try to get around that. I think, I don't think that's a particular problem for Bob Dole, I really don't. I mean if, you know, if it was, if it was so overwhelming, the press's influence, you know, why did we have the results we had in 1994? But, but is the press intrinsically liberal? Yeah, probably."

MORE: Many more admissions of bias from media insiders can be found on this page.