Purple State, I did not say this at all. In fact, the whole point of my post was that a reporter's (or scientist's, or scholar's) way to the truth is 1) through exposing oneself sufficiently over a period of time to a subject, so that he or she knows the range of good (i.e. relevant) questions that may be asked, and 2) holding stringently to rules of evidence. The idea that, rather, biases are key, but may perhaps be held in check the way an AA member holds alcoholism in check, is everywhere in these comments. The position makes a nonsense of epistemology.

How you get to good questions is an unpredictable journey. Tony Judt, for example, got to wonder about a binational state, in part, by going to an Israeli kibbutz in his youth, and then by looking sympathetically at the EU (I am greatly simplifying, of course; there were also, no doubt, thousands of other personal encounters on the journey). I did something very much like Judt, but argued a different position in The Hebrew Republic. In neither case, should he or I be judged by our journeys. And yet neither of us have a "transparent eyeball." No, the plausibility of what we say should be judged on the basis of the range of questions we deal with and their logic and evidence.

For example, I think Judt ignores too much the significance and richness of Hebrew culture, the ways the EU protects national cultures, and the implausibility of mixing an economy like Israel's with that of Palestine's in a unitary state. My Palestinian friends in Ramallah agree. But Judt, if he were able (alas), might mount other arguments against mine. It is these, not our "biases," that matter.

Regarding NYT, you want people who have made some kind of journey. I find NYT people who come to the region "fresh" as naive as, well, Tony Blair. You can painfully see the learning curve in reporters, especially from EU countries, and who want to be hip and left--outside the American "mainstream"--and call me all the time for ideas. The problem, you see, is not how to define the "mainstream," but how one gets into the conversation at all.

May I humbly suggest that what we are "brought up to love" does not exhaust how we will think about things throughout our lives? My mother thought I should be a rabbi. This, it is true, got me very interested in rabbis when I was about 10. Jim Carroll actually became a priest. But things didn't end there, for him or for me.

Would the fact that Carroll was a former priest disqualify him from covering the Vatican? If the Jerusalem bureau chief does not speak Arabic, would it be better if he or she spoke no Hebrew as well?

What's missing here, I must stress again, is an appreciation for a cultivated mind. George Kennan was married to a Russian and spoke fluent Russian. William Shirer was married to an Austrian and spoke fluent German. Such things can open us to good questions we might not have otherwise seen.

"That paragraph only states the Times's very reasonable ethical guideline that acknowledges the possibility of bias when reporters find themselves in circumstances, such as the activities of a family member, that could affect their credibility, and that requires reporters to report these circumstances to their editors, so that the editors can make the call. It says nothing about any assumptions or presumptions one way or another about what the majority of readers will think or ought to think, and apparently leaves the judgment to the editor."

How can the standard be "credibility" and not be about "what a majority of readers think."

My point was, precisely, that the public editor should have taken on what people "ought to think." And he should have insisted that the difference between Bronner's integrity (leave aside "credibility," which is too squishy, since we don't know credible to whom?) and, say, "the activities of a family member" is that raft of big things called discrimination, logic, exposure to manifold life experiences, the confrontation with contradictions, knowledge of rules of evidence, and fact checking--in short, the difference is a person's complex (or as Keller says, "sophisticated) mind and knowledge of craft.

Objectivity is not "admitting your biases" and struggling against them, as if objectivity is a kind of sobriety and getting to objectivity means going to a kind of journalist's AA. Objectivity (a foolish word in any case) is a process. Bronner adheres rigorously to it. Only his questions are better than most.

I have three grown children and three grown step-children, doing all kinds of things, and married or coupled to all kinds of people. If you think this means my credibility depends on my recusing myself from comment on every issue where others will rashly suspect my arguments are tainted in advance that is, by my loyalties, then you don't understand what it means for writers to broaden their horizons.

http://labs.daylife.com/journalist/ethan_bronner

and peruse what he has written and judge for themselves?

...Obviously minsters and congregants may be politically active, but they cannot use church funds. I would like us to think about similar changes to our social compact with corporations. I'm not really sure what we gain by asking corporations to pay taxes, since they just pass this cost on to their customers. By removing the tax, we are removing an obvious reason why a corporation would legitimately claim to be a "citizen" in need of representation (though I agree they might continue to argue about the regulatory environment). It feels to me more hygienic, as with churches, to see corporations as chartered to fulfill a restricted purpose, pay no taxes, and be banned from the realm of electoral politics. Good for us, and good for them.

Dan K, as usual a very thoughtful and articulate criticism. On the whole, there is little in your underlying approach that I would take issue with. But I don't think you appreciate how radical is the proposal I am half-seriously advancing.

First, Bill Gates is so closely associated with Microsoft, and is so wealthy, he may not be our best example, although you'd have to admit he is very different persona now than when he was defending himself against anti-trust suits. On the whole, when people act as private citizens, they have to appeal to some notion of a universal good. It is hard to imagine Bill Gates starting a nonprofit arguing for bundling browsers with operating systems, though when you look at the NRA, you can see how these lines get crossed. No solution is airtight,but the question is: what kind of problems do you want to struggle with? I would rather have rich people restricted to activities in the commonwealth, rather than acting as managers, advancing the peculiar interests of their companies.

Second, competition these days is very intense. When managers at General Motors or AT&T or Procter & Gamble or General Electric commit to changing the contours of the playing field, they are simultaneously committing to a range of products and strategy and business architecture, all of which are very hard to undo. These managers are much more anonymous than Bill Gates is, and much less rich. They should be forced to get up every morning and worry about whether the company will still be around in five years. Because if they are not prepared to innovate, they won't be around. Tinkering with the playing field may buy them a little time; but the forces working against them are much bigger than anything Congress can control.

By the way,I very much like the analogy to religion. The separation of religion and state really is good for religion, as any American who has seen the empty brooding cathedrals of France can see. I live much of the time in Jerusalem where an established religion is destroying both democratic life and itself. America's founders all had lively religious imaginations, and wanted the freedom and creativity of individuals to continue to inform theology. Freedom and creativity are necessary for business strategy, too, a Philistine comment in the context of religion, perhaps, but another way of saying that freedom and creativity are necessary for just about anything of value. Nobody is as smart as everybody.

One last thing, I am not trying to tell the heads of corporations that getting out of politics completely is for their own good any more than I would try to tell Cardinal Spellman that getting out of politics would be good for the Catholic Church. My appeal is to the readers of this blog, ordinary citizens, to think about rules that we could enact to rein in corporations. But, again, the analogy to religious institutions may be helpful. In return for staying out of politics as institutions, churches pay no taxes. Obviously, ministers and congeragnts