"Bias" = BS.

Would everyone just shut up with all of the shit about "bias"? Please? From a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (by way of a recent item in FiveThirtyEight.com):

The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows. . . . Republicans continue to be highly critical of the news media in nearly all respects. However, much of the growth in negative attitudes toward the news media over the last two years is driven by increasingly unfavorable evaluations by Democrats. . . . The partisan gaps in several of these opinions, which had widened considerably over the past decade, have narrowed.

Okay, let me make clear that I'm not criticizing the notion that calculating such figures can be useful or informative. What I despise, however, is the utter lack of contextualization, theoretical apparatus or coherent interpretation to accompany these data.

Here are some questions that come to mind -- variations of which suggest themselves more or less every time statistics are presented in popular news reporting and that are never accorded so much as lip-service -- with these empty data:

1. Is there really something lurking in the concept of "bias" that retains its meaning and/or coherence when abstracted from specific contexts and conceptualizations?
2. What is the difference between news coverage with a "bias" and news coverage that evidences advocacy of a particular point of view or that privileges certain points of view over others?
3. To what extent can "bias," as it's used in this study, be said to mean, "advocacy of particular persons, groups, values or interests that cloaks itself as impartial or objective," and to what extent can it be said to mean, "a shift in the nature or purpose of 'media' from a model that operates under the pretense of impartiality to a model that sheds this pretense in favor of partisan advocacy?"
4. To what extent can the "Democrats" and "Republicans" cited in the study be said to conceptualize the relation between the putative "[in]accuracy" of media and the putative "bias" of media?
5. Doesn't the question of whether news media are "biased" skip over the essential contextual issue, which is: To what extent does (or had previously) each respondent expect media to be something other than "biased"?
6. How can a figure representing perceived "bias" mean anything at all if it is not calibrated with painstaking attention to the fact that, in addition to being a term that means different things to different people in different contexts, the term "bias" is necessarily relative and can only mean anything by way of its relation to constellations of variables?