BIAS, INTEGRITY, BIAS1 (BIAST) AND BIAS2 (BIASF)

The media are biased. For example, when I watch Fox I see bias to the Right, but when I watch CNN or MSNBC I see bias to the Left.
Often we hear that “All of us are biased,” but I’m not so sure that’s true. At the very least, not all of us are biased about everything. And some have even learned about tools which help fight against bias, e.g., the scientific method, even if only imperfectly.
But, the problem for me, and the reason I’m writing this post, is that the word “bias” seems to reflect one of those (rare?) poverties of the English language, and that poverty may be related to an error in our thinking.
Integrity, honesty, sincerity, truth are words with positive value for most of us. A person with integrity, for example, will generally wish to tell the truth, both to others and to herself, even when it might be contrary to agendas, wishes and perhaps to values and ideologies which she may hold.
We HOPE that journalists have integrity. We HOPE to see integrity in the media, in academia and in Hollywood. I’m not sure that we always do.
But now, what about this thing called “bias”? If you are biased, then are you necessarily sacrificing your integrity to the extent you are biased? Or, perhaps, can you lean to the Left or to the Right, for example, and yet still honor your integrity? If you used ALL the rules and principles of critical thinking, objectivity, fair argumentation and debate, dialectic and so forth, both during your internal self-talk and during your speaking and conversing with others, could you still even BE biased? I’m not positive about the answer to this question, but I believe that even if everyone used all these tools of integrity and objectivity, we would for many reasons probably still be left with a population of widely divergent thinkers who would hold diverging, even opposing, views on many things.
So, without further ado, and perhaps without answering the above question, I’ll say that where I am leading is that I wish to suggest the use of two additional words: bias1 and bias2, or, if you will, biast and biasf. A person with bias1 may be biased in a certain area of thought, for example she may be a conservative. Yet her integrity is so strong that she avoids lying, sins of omission, and other errors in critical thinking and the other tools of integrity, whenever talking to others or herself, even when these dishonesties support her bias and/or her agendas. (“Biast”=”bias-truth.”) On the other hand, with bias2, she would use the same bias as an excuse to dispense with her integrity and, well, basically, to lie, to herself and to others. (“Biasf”=”bias-falsehood.”)
OK. Does that seem clear enough, and am I talking about a logically coherent, realistic “parsing of reality”? Maybe, maybe not. I believe so, though, or I would not be writing this.
With my “new” words, I can say that the opinion talkers (Hosts of opinion segments on news stations) and even the straight-ahead journalists may be Left-biased at CNN and MSNBC and Right-biased at Fox News. But, for example, the Left-biased ones may be bias2=biasf while the Right-biased ones may be bias1=biast, at least notionally.
But wait! The fact that I even chose that particular example might show that I am Right-biased, and even biasf, because I did not disclose my bias or give fair and balanced examples! And maybe that is true. And I did that on purpose, because, today, when I watch Fox I perceive Right-bias1 more often than Right-bias2, yet when I watch CNN or MSNBC I perceive Left-bias2 more often than Left-bias1. And the difference is substantial, to me. Does that reflect again merely my own bias, which perhaps is not consciously available to me, or does it reflect a reality, an objective reality? I have my own opinions there, but for now, I leave you with merely the new words and a new way of thinking about bias–or perhaps, at least, a new way.