Full Disclosure
Instead of an “About” page Malcolm Gladwell has a great disclosure statement on his site, where he goes off on fascinating tangents about his job at the New Yorker and that of a writer and speaker.
A good portion of the page describes the differences between being biased and having an opinion and how they affect or don’t affect the journalists and writers:
Do any of these opinions rise to the level of bias? I don’t think so. They don’t cohere in a single identifiable ideology. And they aren’t predictive, in the sense that they lead me inexorably towards writing in a pro-God, pro-Democratic, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-free trade, pro-higher taxes, anti-Iraq war kind of way. If you look at my articles, in fact, you’ll see that I rarely even write about the subject areas where I have the most strongly held opinions. What’s more, when I interview or profile people I don’t ask them for their opinions on these same subjects–so there’s very little chance for any conflict or agreement in our attitudes to become an issue. I should also say that, by the time you read this, any number of the opinions I’ve stated above may well have changed. That’s another important difference between biases and opinions. Biases are pretty stable. Opinions come and go.
Gladwell’s disclosure statement is pretty long, but well worth the time it takes to read it.