James Taranto has caught a great example of inevitable subjectivity in reporting by asking "are there two different Fort Bennings?".
"Bush Cheered at Fort Benning: FORT BENNING, Ga.--President Bush, surrounded on Thursday by cheering soldiers in camouflage, defended his decision to send 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq and cautioned that the buildup will not produce quick results. 'It's going to take awhile,' he said."--headline and lead paragraph, Associated Press, Jan. 11"Bush Speaks and Base Is Subdued: FORT BENNING, Ga., Jan. 11--President Bush came to this Georgia military base looking for a friendly audience to sell his new Iraq strategy. But his lunchtime talk received a restrained response from soldiers who clapped politely but showed little of the wild enthusiasm that they ordinarily shower on the commander in chief."--New York Times, Jan. 12
Neither the AP nor the NYT are known for a conservative bias, so it's hard to argue that this difference in reporting is due to a difference in bias. The fact of the matter is that determining whether cheers are "restrained" or not is a matter of subjectivity that perhaps shouldn't be considered in a news article at all.
