Complaints about “media bias” are perceived as significant, but not for the reason most people seem to suspect.

It’s not about partisanship — that is, bias in favor of one political party or another. It’s about good news and bad news. When news organizations treat good news or bad news as “neutral,” it doesn’t come across as a lack of bias; it comes across as inaccurate and untruthful. It doesn’t come across as “disinterested” in the sense of dispassionate and unadulterated; it comes across as disinterested in the sense of apathetic and unconcerned about the story’s impact on real people in the real world.

If you report good news without acknowledging that it is actually good news, you appear biased against the good. That sounds easy – to use a recently revived phrase – strange.

News outlets usually get this right when reporting on something like a natural disaster. “Tornado destroys orphanage” is reported – accurately and correctly – as bad news. The subtitle of this article – “All children escape unharmed” – is reported as good news in the context of this bad news. The article is reported – accurately and correctly – celebrate the survival of children and mourn their loss of a home.

But as soon as there is even the slightest hint of “politics” involved, the reports will take on a sinister, inhuman aspect that puts an end to the joy of those who celebrate and the grief of those who mourn. The next day’s story – “Governor refuses to help rebuild orphanage” – is oddly treated as a neutral story, when it absolutely is not. It is bad news. Just as next week’s sequel – “Governor gives in to pressure, promises to rebuild orphanage” – is good news, but comes across as grossly distorted and inaccurate when reported neutrally and without understanding that this is a cause for celebration.

The first, accurate reports of the tornado and the children’s escape will include the voices of those children. They see their survival for what it is: good news. And in this “non-political” story, that perspective is allowed. But the children’s voices will not be included in the “political” stories that follow, because that could be understood as taking sides against the governor who is taking sides against them. You can’t have orphans commenting in a story about orphanages, because they obviously “biased.”

I’ve written about this many times. Here’s one from a few years ago: “Media bias should be good news.”

This post from 2017 contains another hypothesis that is no longer a hypothesis:

So let’s go back to the local pages and look at another story – this one about giving hungry, poor children a nutritious hot meal.

That’s good news, isn’t it? I mean, objectively speaking, feeding hungry children is a good thing. If someone doesn’t see that, then there’s no point in arguing with them about the categories of “good thing” and “bad thing.” Just like understanding that it’s bad news when a family loses their home in a fire, the fact that feeding hungry children is good news shouldn’t need any explanation or defense.

Yet the story of hungry children being fed locally is not usually reported as good news. Sometimes it is – if the meal in question is provided by a harmless, uncontroversial local charity on Christmas Day, then it’s fine. Everyone agrees it’s good news, and it’s reported with the warm glow of glad tidings of great joy.

But that doesn’t happen when the children are fed through, say, a government-funded school lunch program. Then it becomes a “political” story and we have to pretend that it is neither good news nor bad news, but a matter of a zero-sum game. “Politics,” you see, is more like sports – there is a winning team and a losing team. And those teams are the focus of the story – not the hungry children.

This ultimately means that much good news must never be reported as good news. And bad news – even catastrophically bad news – is not reported as bad news. These stories are instead reported as “political” news. That is, we pretend that their consequences are neither good nor bad in order to avoid partisan bias or the possible accusation of partisan bias.

And that means we misunderstand these stories.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed a law guaranteeing lunch for every schoolchild in the state. Now he is being attacked, not only by his political opponents but also by “political reporters” who see this good news as something Walz needs to defend or perhaps even apologize for.

“You’ve legalized marijuana for recreational use, you’ve implemented universal background checks for guns, you’ve expanded protections for LGBTQ people, you’ve implemented tuition-free college for low-income Minnesotans. There’s free breakfast and lunch for school kids,” Jake Tapper told him in a recent CNN interview.

Walz remained calm. “What a monster,” he said. “The children have full bellies so they can learn.”

Tapper did not explicitly say that “free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren” was bad news, but his role as a political reporter did not allow him to admit that it was good news. After reciting this litany of objective and obviously good news, Tapper asked, “Do you think (this) record is an electoral plus, or is there a risk that you are fueling Trump’s attacks as a liberal supporter of big government?”

Go on your way and tell Jake what you have seen and heard. The hungry are being fed. That is good news.

The same inability to recognize and name the Good News is reflected in the Republicans’ creepy attacks on Walz as “Tampon Tim.”

The governor, who was a high school teacher for more than 20 years, also signed a law requiring school districts to provide free access to tampons and pads to all students who need them. That’s good news, and there’s no way to properly report it without acknowledging it — without celebrating it as a victory for Minnesota’s children, schools and families.

Before MAGA, Republicans might have attacked this good news as “fiscally reckless,” claiming that the cost of menstrual supplies would bankrupt school districts or force them to raise taxes. (The reality — a competent government capable of viewing this new spending as an investment in students far beyond its modest cost — would not have occurred to “small government” ideologues as a possibility, because if you hate government, you hate governing and are bad at it and can’t handle new spending without going bankrupt or having to raise taxes on workers.) This law was funded out of the federal budget. Excess, which also financed tax rebates.)

But MAGA Republicans have other obsessions. They don’t attack “Tampon Tim” because free menstrual products are “socialism.” They attack Walz because he “placed tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools” and “there is no greater threat to a woman’s health” than that.

This is again only strange. The law simply says that school districts must have a plan to ensure that every student who needs these materials can access them for free. It does not mandate that tampons be provided in boys’ restrooms. But because the law does not explicitly prohibit or criminalize the possibility that tampons might be available anywhere other than girls’ restrooms, it is being attacked as a state-sponsored attempt to make all teenagers transgender. Does that make sense? No. At least not to anyone who isn’t a sick creep deeply and feverishly obsessed with what’s in teenagers’ underwear. (MAGA: Make all genitalia accessible.)

Here are two reports on the matter. The first is from CBS News’ Aimee Picci: “Governor Tim Walz made tampons free in Minnesota schools. Here’s why he’s raising Trump’s ire.” The second is from NPR’s Rachel Treisman: “Why Republicans are calling Walz ‘Tampon Tim’ — and why Democrats are applauding it.”

Your homework is to read both articles, noting what is treated as good news, what is bad news, and what is treated as “political” and thus outside the realm of good and evil. For extra credit, consider who is interviewed and quoted in these articles – who is invited or authorized to speak about them, and how the selection of those voices is shaped by a determination not to report this as good news.