Michael Goodwin: Civil War, D.C.-style

New York Daily News

It's a civil war in Washington. The combatants have an eye-for-an-eye mentality. The partisanship is heated and nasty.

Republicans versus Democrats? Nah. This one pits the media against the White House.

It's a war the media can't win, and shouldn't wage.

"It was a hostile hectoring that revealed much of the mainstream press for what it has become: the opposition party."

The intense grilling that White House reporters inflicted on presidential spokesman Scott McClellan Monday over whether political guru Karl Rove leaked the name of a CIA operative was no ordinary give-and-take. It was a hostile hectoring that revealed much of the mainstream press for what it has become: the opposition party.

Forget fairness, or even the pretense of it. With one of its own locked up - Judith Miller of The New York Times - much of the Beltway gang has declared war on the White House.

Reporters apparently have decided Democrats aren't up to the job. Can't blame them. With Dems reduced to Howard Dean's rants and Hillary Clinton's juvenile jab that President Bush looks like Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, somebody has to offer a substantive alternative. The press has volunteered.

That the mainstream media are basically liberals with press passes has been documented by virtually every study that measures reporters' political identification and issue positions. But bias has now slopped over into blatant opposition, a stance the media will regret. Instead of providing unvarnished facts obtained by aggressive but fair-minded reporting, the media will be reduced to providing comfort food to ideological comrades.

"That the mainstream media are basically liberals with press passes has been documented by virtually every study that measures reporters' political identification and issue positions."

Already held in lower esteem by the public than lawyers and Congress, the press risks looking like a special interest group. Its claims to represent "the American people," as one McClellan inquisitor did, are easily ignored when it serves as an echo chamber for the anti-Bush.