FAIR AND BALANCED, AN EXAMPLE
FoxNews begins a story on the global warming debate as follows:

No one knows for sure whether the Earth’s climate is changing appreciably or whether any such change is due to humans. One thing that certainly is heating up, though, is the global warming litigation environment.

Here's the beginning of a Reuters story.

About 160,000 people die every year from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition and the numbers could almost double by 2020, a group of scientists said on Tuesday.

The study, by scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said children in developing nations seemed most vulnerable.

A couple of London doctors? Are there no climatologists? And it just goes on like that. How about the Associated Press:

California will join as many as nine other states in suing the federal Environmental Protection Agency, to make sure the agency can't interfere with efforts to control greenhouse gases, Gov. Gray Davis, said Friday.

The announcement comes the week after Davis and his Democratic counterparts from Washington and Oregon laid out a plan to combat global warming, and after the federal agency in August said it lacks authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from motor vehicles.

Just a small lesson in how assumed facts in stories can constitute biased reporting.