Re: Herald's Dean Johnson on new 1150 talker

[Richard Chonak <rac@gabrielmass.com>]

Aaron Read wrote:

> Again, I'm painting in VERY broad strokes here.   And FWIW, the media do 
> use terms that are synonymous with "ultra-liberal"...you heard it all 
> the time on Rush's show. 


Hi, Aaron.

Rush Limbaugh isn't a journalist: did you miss part of my point?  I was 
referring to the word "ultra-conservative" in the work of journalists.   For 
instance, the Dean Johnson piece that attracted my interest when it called Don 
Feder "ultra-conservative" was written as news, not as an opinion column, as far 
as I know.

IMHO Rush is entitled to deliver personal opinions about who he considers 
"ultra-" this or that.   But in the practice of journalism, one should know 
better than to apply a pejorative label, the label of extremism ("ultra-"), to 
members of one political faction but never to its opposite number.

By the way, when people on the political right call themselves 
"ultraconservative", they're making fun of the pejorative term.

Here's a data point: I searched Google News for "ultraconservative" and got 
"about 470" hits.   A search for "ultraliberal" yielded "about 4" hits.

--RC