Turn on the fog…
Howard Kurtz makes the following statement today regarding the coverage of Harriet Miers:
This time, no one can blame the liberal media. And what made the right’s revolt all the more remarkable was that its opinion-mongering wing didn’t simply stand in polite opposition to Miers. Its troops hit the trenches, attacked Miers as unqualified, ripped President Bush for cronyism and in some cases raised money to defeat the nomination.
To have any meaning at all, “liberal media” must denote some identifiable portion of the news media–a portion, I would argue, that operates within the goal of journalistic practice to provide the information citizens need to make civic life work. Its pathetic and propagandistic connotation, however, includes the media in general. But that definition is demonstrably absurd because we can easily identify overtly liberal and conservative partisans (individuals and organizations) beneath the umbrella of “media.”
Opinion journalists are supposed to approach their work from an overt and identifiable ideology. Liberal opinion journalists do not create the pathetic “liberal media,” which is the focus of political struggle, nor do they contribute to a liberal media bias any more than their conservative counterparts. The reason: Their ideological approaches to journalism are expected by any reasonable reader of an op-ed section.
By dragging the concept of media bias into this, Kurtz turns on the fog machine and obscures some interesting issues about how to define the roles of opinion journalists versus pundits–the partisans such as Coulter and Limbaugh–and what their roles ought to be in the civic discussion of politics and governance.
UPDATE (1:00 p.m.): I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the word “fricative” 
As in: Conservatives have been “borked.” Now they’re “miered.” But will they get “syked”?
