Jan Myrdal on "Bias"

"...the usefulness of this book to the reader in his search for realities and the validity of my whole argument rests, of course, on my honesty. That goes for any book or study, though many writers try to hide the fact behind an objectivization that is misleading. No writer is as mechanically accurate as an electronic computer; but even a computer is programmed and one always has to ask how was the programming done? What was the bias of the programmer?

Very few writers are subjectively dishonest. The real question is thus not honesty or dishonesty, but what is the code of honesty of this specific writer. i.e. his bias? No human being can be an unbiased observer of other humans. The reader thus has to take my honesty, i.e. that I'm not willfully changing the facts that I report, on trust. But he has at the same time to remember that I'm biased."
(from Jan Myrdal's Introduction to Report from a Chinese Village, 1965)