Matt Welch links to this piece by Jay Rosen, who makes some penetrating observations on the comportment of John Carroll of the LA Times and Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air.

If you've got the time, it's worth listening to the archive of Gross' interview with Bill O'Reilly. It's as fascinating as radio interview train wrecks can ever be.

Strangely, just earlier today I was thinking about the segment in which Gross interviewed Gene Simmons of KISS; a segment which NPR itself refers to as "infamous." What struck me most about that interview was not Simmons' boorishness, but Gross' reaction to that. It was almost as if all pretense of objectivity was jettisoned; it became open season on Simmons. Indeed, he was hardly what I would call kind, sensitive, or considered, but he was damned funny. More than that, he was starkly honest. In fact, in his own way, he adopted the unspeakable language Rosen writes about, albeit as a subject and not as a journalist. He spoke candidly of the thrill of being a rock star, the power that gives him, his pride in having bedded untold hundreds of women. He made no excuses for himself and didn't try to soften the coarseness of his behavior. You may not approve of his behavior--I don't so much disapprove as I just don't comprehend the will to live like that--but if you could separate yourself from the deeds he spoke of and the affirmation with which he told them, you had to hand it to him for speaking the unvarnished truth in plain language.

Gross was just flabbergasted; you could almost hear the bottom of her jaw scraping the floor. At times, her follow-up questions felt more like naked criticism than follow-ups. I was stunned most of all by her conduct. Nobody expects journalists to not have opinions, but in her capacity as a journalist, I expect that all guests should be handled equally, and should that fail to happen, then I would at least hope that the fissure that opens up at that point be filled with the admission that there is an agenda, not a poorly rationalized pretense that it's okay for guests to be held accountable to different standards depending on who they are.

So I'm wondering how this relates to the O'Reilly story. Certainly, as Rosen says, Gross plays a sure hand through most of the interview, but it comes badly apart at the end, and it's through that shattering of pretense that I think Gross is revealed to be--or representing the interests of an organization that is--taking an activist, biased stance towards subjects it somehow deems contemptible.