The White Knight’s Dilemma: Glenn Harvey’s “Bias Busters” for Columbia Journalism Review

Glenn Harvey’s cover illustration for CJR’s “Bias Busters” feature is a single image that crystallizes the ambiguity at the heart of Amos Barshad’s investigation into the growing industry of bias-tracking startups.

A knight in gleaming silver armor rides a white horse through a twilight landscape, wielding an oversized microphone. It’s gorgeous, immediately legible, and deeply skeptical all at once.

As Harvey noted on Instagram, the White Knight is “usually a symbol of justice, righteousness and truth—but also of naïveté and a saviour complex.” This duality maps precisely onto the article’s subjects: companies like AllSides and USAFacts, often funded by billionaire tech entrepreneurs who believe data and AI can cure America’s information crisis.

The quest for perfect objectivity, Harvey suggests, belongs more to fable than to the messy reality of American media.

Based in Brooklyn, Harvey has built a formidable editorial practice with clients including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He describes himself as influenced by “strong narratives in genres like sci-fi, fantasy, crime, and mystery,” and that literary sensibility permeates his work.

The “Bias Busters” piece sits at a rich intersection of stylistic influences. The heroic central figure, detailed armor, and storybook landscape descend from the Golden Age of American Illustration—Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth’s tradition of knights rendered in saturated color with compositional grandeur. The flat, layered composition and rich color gradients recall WPA poster art of the 1930s, which combined Art Deco geometry with populist messaging. And the gradient-heavy sky, atmospheric layering, and visible grain texture keeps Harvey’s historical references feeling current rather than nostalgic.

The armor gleams, the horse is magnificent. You want to believe in this knight. And yet the fairy-tale setting, the oversized cartoon microphone, the frosty twilight undermine certainty. Is this a champion riding into battle, or a Don Quixote tilting at windmills?