Some of my fellow journalists take my decision to start Skewed News Tutor as an attack on our profession. As a sign that I’ve picked up a tactic used so often with them that it becomes tedious: the condemning of the “biased media.”

When I find those peers who will listen, though, I explain that I’ve started Skewed News Tutor exactly because I love this profession so much. I refuse to see it decline to the point where we give up any attempt at balanced reporting and instead cash our big checks by becoming blatant Republicans or Democrats doing lazy politicized news reporting. Skewed News Tutor is my acknowledgment that a single journalist in the Midwest isn’t going to change the direction of the nation’s journalism unless I encourage the public to demand it – to encourage what I believe is an existing grassroots movement for ethical and fair journalism.

All of this is why I was so interested and encouraged last night when CBS made an announcement that they are changing the writing behind their television reports. They emphasized how they are going to spend more time focusing on being fair. I loved this announcement.

First, it took guts for them to offer what is essentially an acknowledgement of past mistakes in this area. Secondly, they must sense what I sense and what polls have found: journalism is going to lose the one thing we have going for us if we aren’t careful - the public’s trust.

I tweeted (from @NewsTutor) about this announcement after they made it last night, saying I’d be interested to see how it went. But then I watched CBS This Morning and found a problem already. Watch the interview of Marco Rubio that followed a recap of President Obama’s address last night. One of the anchors this morning said to him:

“Senator, you have been called the Republican savior. Yesterday, you voted against the Violence Against Women Act, you have opposed repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, you oppose universal backgrounds checks for gun buyers, you have yet to introduce a bill on immigration reform. Is that the future of the Republican party?”

This is shallow journalism. I would like to think that the writer of this bit had read the entire proposed new version of the Violence Against Women Act to see what had been added but I suspect they hadn’t. Do they understand that members of Congress regularly add in provisions to bills understanding that their peers don’t want journalists pointing out that they voted against something such as the “Violence Against Cute Little Puppies Act?”

So we in the media fall right into that and paint these politicians as being in favor of beating women instead of really digging in and examining the specific provision a politician objected to?

And don’t even get me started on the fact that CBS then dedicated time on their national broadcast to ask Rubio about the drink of water he took during his talk the night before. I almost cried at this point. In order to claim fairness, they now have to ask Obama about his feelings (“Were you nervous?”) every time he takes a drink during a national talk. And they weren't the only media outlet to discuss this.

Our country has so many more important things to talk about. Anyone have a national broadcast handy that I could put to better use?

I will say, however, that I am hesitant to do too much Monday morning quarterbacking of news reporting. I know that sometimes circumstances that we can't understand from outside the newsroom might interfere with providing a perfect report. But I do believe that we should start giving three strikes and you’re out – not for an entire news organization but the specific individual behind the report. Like any profession, there are incompetent or lazy individuals at good organizations. So I would love to know who wrote that segment for CBS this morning. And I would love to know why the anchor didn’t correct what she should have seen as a problematic interview considering the announcement the boss had just made.

But, please don’t give up on CBS yet. I can name many news outlets that are far worse, and CBS, at least, shows some signs of wanting to improve.

Perhaps CBS’s morning desk simply didn’t get the memo from last night yet.

It must have still been in their inbox while they were busy editing that hard-hitting footage of Rubio’s drink of water.