A recent research paper published by the University of Virginia dubiously concludes, “There is No Liberal Media Bias in the News Political Journalists Choose to Cover.” While the researchers did find that the vast majority of mainstream journalists lean hard to the left — to the left of even socialist Bernie Sanders — they still maintained that this reality doesn’t skew their reporting.

Of course, if this were genuinely the case, the political leanings of mainstream-media journalists would be a mystery to us — at least insofar as their reporting is concerned.

“The funny thing about this study is that it purports to show that even though journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, their political bias doesn’t affect the stories they choose to cover or not cover,” observes Power Line’s John Hinderaker. “Which is why the press paid a hundred times as much attention to the biggest political scandal in US history, the coordinated effort by the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Justice to swing the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton, or, failing that, to disable the Trump presidency, as to the entirely fabricated, implausible and politically paid-for fantasy that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. Right?”

The fact of the matter is, an individual’s political bias is both inescapable and influential — and journalists aren’t somehow magically exempt from human nature. This bias can only be mitigated if it is recognized, acknowledged, and balanced with competing ideological perspectives. If mainstream-media journalists continue to maintain the fiction that their reporting is impervious to their personal bias, they’ll continue to earn the enmity and deep distrust of the American people. And rightly so.