I know that this story is going to be quoted endlessly to show how bad Bush is.

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."

However, buried near the bottom is this assessment:

Among the report's major findings is that the likelihood of "great power conflict escalating into total war . . . is lower than at any time in the past century." However, "at no time since the formation of the Western alliance system in 1949 have the shape and nature of international alignments been in such a state of flux as they have in the past decade."

This is a "major finding". The world is in less danger of another world war than at any time in the last century. And it is hidden in the second to last paragraph. Even the subhead ('May lose its edge') misdirects the reader.

What is bias and what is not? The story above is biased. A major finding that is good news is hidden so that the anti-Bush can take precedence. The CBS national guard story went beyond bias because they knew at the time that their sources were questionable (or at least, they were told and refused to listen).

Mary Mapes was biased in believing that there must be something more to the Bush National Guard story. She went past bias when she bypassed all of CBS's standards for verification. She lied and misrepresented her sources to her superiors To this day, she insists that the content of the memos is true, even if the documents themselves are not.

Firing Mapes and the others will not get rid of bias but it will at least insure that outright lies are less likely to be aired. That's really about as much as we can hope for.