Conservatives have long complained the press is biased against them. Lately liberals have taken up the same cry.

Now technologists have the right to call out the media as well. When an organization that claims to be totally dedicated to the search for objective truth, like the Associated Press, starts slipping bias into its tech coverage, watch out.

I first saw the story, and headline, in the Rocky Mountain News. Opera has placed BitTorrent support directly into its browser, hoping that will help it pick up market share against Firefox and Explorer.

But the headline? Piracy tool turns legit. And the text was no better. " The Opera Web browser will soon support a file-transfer tool commonly associated with online movie piracy."

Excuse me, AP, but bull-cookies. BitTorrent is not Kazaa. It's a technology. There's no business there. Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming FTP or SMTP or even HTTP for piracy, because you can move copyrighted files. You can move copyrighted content across all Internet protocols. They are value-neutral. And the head of Opera even told you why he did this -- because it enabled the rapid distribution of Opera itself and Opera wanted such a capability widely-available.

Techdirt went ape-biscuits over this, as they should have, but never considered why the AP acted as it did.

Here's why.

Journalism is a copyright industry.

Newspapers in particular are upset over others' "stealing" their work, if only through hyperlinks. AP, in fact, is moving toward a model that will charge for online use of its wire.

Note, please, that the link to AP's release on this from Wikipedia has been taken down, and the New York Times story linked from here is now behind a paid firewall.

The news industry as a whole is moving increasingly toward the idea that stories are commodities, like movies or recordings, and that common Internet usage of such material represents piracy. Many AP papers are now behind registration firewalls, and AP's new pricing policy will accelerate the trend.

Thus, the AP has an institutional bias against the Internet, a business bias.

But what I was told in journalism school is that reporters have a duty, not to be unbiased (which is impossible) but to be fair, which is to know their biases and lean against them.

This too the AP is no longer willing to do.

And so we will now learn. Can a co-op continue to hold up the banner of fairness after it tosses away its soul? When we can no longer assume fairness in your writing about yourself, where can we assume fairness?

We have a right, now, not to believe AP. And that's a great loss to us all.