The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.

Paul Robin Krugman (born February 28 1953) is an American economist Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008 Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography.

According to the prize Committee the prize was given for Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services. His popular commentary has attracted considerable comment both positive and negative.