Animated disagreement between coworkers is a venerable tradition often denied to Bright Hall's far-flung, break room-less staff. Advise & Dissent is an attempt to fix that. Click here for past debates.

Reading a news story is nothing like talking to the reporter who wrote it.

If you've ever spoken to a journalist, you know how true that is. Maybe, in conversation, the reporter reveals more information, or more background that comes from spending years on the same beat.

Or maybe he gives you his perspective -- and not an ill-researched, slanted opinion like the ones you find in super-partisan literature, or in the comments section at the bottom of blog posts like this. A reporter who spends a half-dozen months covering a presidential candidate sometimes knows more about that person than the candidate himself.

At the very least, reporters know much, much more than what they write in their stories, simply because a news hole is finite but knowledge is not.

One man who understands that principle is Ron Fournier, the new Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, who has encouraged his staff to put themselves in their stories. This has ushered in ledes written in first-person, and a writing style that is more unconventional to the AP than the flat tax is to congressional Democrats.

That's a joke that wouldn't have flown at the bureau until Ron took over in May. Since then he has essentially asked his reporters to be more human. It's the reason I called him by his first name at the beginning of this paragraph, and the reason I used the word "I" three times in this sentence.

Yeah, the AP is going to be around forever. It will always be the first to the news, and it will always be the most accurate and fair news service. To suggest it is biased because its reporters have suddenly been told to use the right sides of their brains is to reveal limited knowledge of what bias is.

Bias suggests intent. The intent of an AP reporter is not the same as the intent of the propaganda distributors for the campaigns of Democrat Barack Obama, Republican John McCain or still-deciding Mitt Romney.

What my colleague probably meant, in accusing the AP of a flaming bias, is that the most reliable institution of information in the world is suddenly becoming more conversational, and more appealing to readers at a time when most Americans would rather watch Miss USA 2008 fall down than pick up a newspaper.

There is nothing wrong with veteran political reporter Beth Fouhy leading her story with, "I miss Hillary." You know why? Because she does. And if she didn't write that, she wouldn't be telling you the whole truth.