Media bias is nothing new.

[Commentary] As a general rule, the public often seems to believe that the press is supposed to be objective and that something is wrong when it is not. There is a palpable sense that we have somehow strayed from a golden era of press objectivity, and a correspondent longing to return to those days. One complication: Those Shangri-La days never really existed — or at least not for long.

Media has much more frequently been a partisan pastime, ever since the country was created. Yet efforts to define and practice objectivity through the years quickly devolved into arguments about just what objectivity meant. Some researchers now say that far from being a departure from an ideal past, today’s sharp partisan criticisms of bias actually reflect a return to normal. “Perhaps MSNBC and Fox, et al., actually do represent a return to the partisan origins of American media (in the 18th and 19th centuries) and objectivity is an anomaly,” said Thomas Terry, a professor of journalism and communication at Utah State University. Audiences have fragmented into small special interest groups similar to what existed when this country began. “My theory is that we never actually lost the partisan ideal,” said van Tuyll at Augusta University. “The partisan press is the normal state of journalism.”