Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Dana Milbank writes like the Rush Limbaugh show but with a leftest slant and pretensions of being evenhanded

Karl Rove was out of his element. He left the security of his West Wing office and the Republican fundraising circuit to face an audience of smart-alecky students on a college campus -- a liberal arts college, no less -- here in this reliably blue state. A show of hands found two-thirds of the audience opposed President Bush's plans for Social Security.

What lured Bush's most trusted adviser to this locale was an irresistible invitation: a chance to play media critic. For more than an hour, he lectured about everything that is wrong with journalism, and his conclusion may surprise conservatives such as Tom DeLay, who has been complaining in recent days about a "liberal media" smear campaign.

"I'm not sure I've talked about the liberal media," Rove said when a student inquired -- a decision he said he made "consciously." The press is generally liberal, he argued, but "I think it's less liberal than it is oppositional."

The argument -- similar to the one that former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made in his recent book -- is nuanced, nonpartisan and, to the ears of many journalists, right on target. "Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat," Rove said.

...

Rove left himself and the administration blameless for the tense relations between the Bush White House and the press and for the merger between politics and policy. He started out by quibbling with the title of his lecture "Polarized Press: Media and Politics in the Age of Bush." "It suggests the press is polarized because this is the Age of Bush," he said. "I disagree. The Age of Bush 43 did not cause the polarization."

Rove said that "we'd be better off with greater mutual understanding on the parts of both press and government." But despite Rove's increased visibility of late, the Bush administration prides itself on keeping journalists in the dark about goings-on inside the White House. Quoting the journalist Joe Klein, Rove said reporters should understand "how easy it is to make mistakes" in government. But the president has been famously unwilling to acknowledge mistakes.

Similarly, Rove attested that "most people I know on both sides of the aisle actually believe in the positions they take," and he proposed a rule: "Unless you have clear evidence to the contrary, commentators should answer arguments instead of impugning the motives of those with whom they disagree." But he did not square that with a White House that routinely challenges the motives of those who question Bush, calling them "partisan" and "petty."

Rove discussed the media's well-known tendency toward the negative. "The challenge for the press is to keep a proper degree of skepticism from turning into unremitting hostility and cynicism, and from ignoring good news and progress simply because it might reflect well on those in public office," he said.

But the case-study he cited -- the press's treatment of Bush's education plan in 2001 -- made the press sound far more cynical than it really was. He blasted the Houston Chronicle and The Post for falsely stating that Bush's education plan in 2001 was "stalled" and "bogged down" in the Senate -- but he didn't mention that both reports made clear the delay was only a week. He condemned the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for headlining its article after House passage of the bill, "Bush plan to face more challenges." But the report's main headline said, "House keeps tests in education bill," and it began by saying "President Bush's education reform plan easily weathered a challenge." (Emphasis added.)

This is the Milbank technique, argue with what the person she is reporting on is saying without giving that person an opportunity to respond. While Limbaugh does the same thing he is honest enough to let people know he is making a partisan argument. Milbank is not.