(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your correspondent cannot seem to stay away from the media in this column. He now notes that a brand-new question has tiptoed on tiny feet into the towering debate about sex discrimination in the media. (If you didn't know about this debate or its toweringness, it can only be assumed that you do not work for the media.) The traditional question, or at least the one that has regularly sent the most bits and bytes onto an average cathode ray tube, concerned employment bias against women, frequently stated to be intense among media bigwigs. The new question is even more supercharged: Are women in the media more biased than men in their reporting? The two questions would seem to be symbiotically related, in that a positive answer to the new question would presumably increase the incidence of job discrimination against women in the media. Or would it be discrimination not to hire somebody who was biased? Friends, we are tackling nothing but tough ones today. Typical of the grievances registered in the traditional debate was one that surfaced this past fortnight. It arrived in the form of a study prepared by the National Commission on Working Women of Wider Opportunities for Women, an organization whose name we have yet to parse successfully, and also by Women in Film. The study was financed in part by the Ford Foundation and involved analyses of 238 female and 317 male characters on 80 TV entertainment programs airing last spring. A major point of the whole exercise is to demonstrate that bias keeps women out of the television industry, and that because of this, female characters are depicted unrealistically on the shows. Unfortunately for the logical flow of this argument, the report kept noting that men too are depicted unrealistically. Your servant, who has yet to watch one of these shows or receive a Ford Foundation grant, came away wondering who needs realism in TV entertainment. In any case, we find the issue considerably less compelling than the new question about media sex bias: the question of whether men and women in journalism might be discordant with respect to political bias. This idea has been daringly put forward by the Center for Media and Public Affairs and its co-director, S. Robert Lichter. The center has laid two documents on the table: One is a study of 1988 election coverage on National Public Radio. NPR, it happens, is an organization where women do pretty well: In the campaign, they got 44% of the radio network's air time (vs. about 20% for women on the TV networks). Just as your suspicious correspondent would have assumed, NPR coverage was somewhat more favorable to Dukakis than to Bush. It had never occurred to us, however, that the difference was sex-based. The media center's breakdown shows that among male NPR correspondents, Bush got favorable treatment 26% of the time, vs. 21% for Dukakis. The NPR tilt was entirely female. Renee Montagne, Linda Wertheimer, and Cokie Roberts collectively favored Bush 25% of the time, vs. 45% for Dukakis. A somewhat similar pattern emerges from a 1989 study by the center -- a study we had unaccountably not noticed at the time -- on reporting of the abortion issue. As numerous survey data have made clear, there is no great gulf between American men and women on abortion rights. But the center found a huge difference in the reporting by men and women. It studied the three major television networks, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Taking those five media together, the center found that the reporters' choices of authority figures and quotes ended up giving a slight (53% to 47%) break to the pro-choice side of the argument. However: ''In stories reported by males, the two sides were evenly balanced. In stories reported by females, pro-choice outnumbered pro-life views by a two to one margin.'' Your servant eagerly awaits the debate on the meaning of these findings, and guarantees it will be towering.