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Fairly unbalanced

"Media abundance ... has meant more room for right-of-center viewpoints that, while popular with many Americans, the critics find completely unacceptable. The fact that Bill O'Reilly gets better ratings than Bill Moyers perturbs them to no end. It's just not fair. ...

"When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it's all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it's just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the Left's media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that's not good enough, it seems: they won't rest until all of us are watching, reading, and listening to the content that they prefer."

-- Adam D. Thierer, writing on "The Media Cornucopia," in the spring issue of City Journal'

Partial bias

"The next time you hear a reporter use the term 'so-called "partial birth abortion," ' or 'the procedure that opponents call "partial birth abortion," ' keep in mind that he's making an editorial comment in the midst of his 'news' report.

"The law that Congress passed, the 'Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003' identifies the banned action as: partial-birth abortion. Not 'so-called.'

"In other words, partial-birth abortion is a term enshrined in law. ... But liberal media are so biased in favor of abortion ... that they are attempting to delegitimize a phrase that is part of the law itself.

"Putting partial birth abortion in quote marks is a little like referring to break-in thefts as 'the activity that opponents call "burglary." ' ...

"It's time for the media to drop the ideological agenda and start using the perfectly clear, descriptive term, partial-birth abortion."

-- Robert H. Knight, writing on "Drop the Scare Quotes -- Call It Partial-Birth Abortion," Friday for the Culture and Media Institute at www.cul ture-andmediainstitute.org

'Dangerously wrong'

"One question that should be asked following the massacre of the innocents in Virginia is where on earth did the media find so many social workers, child psychologists and pop philosophers and how were they able to utter such complete rubbish for so long? ...

"Gun control is actually one of the great digressions of modern times. Most shootings, and most pointless crime, are a result of the decaying social fabric of North America and our headlong rush into ethical mud. ...

"The activists campaigning for even more draconian gun control are invariably the same type of people who demand a lower age of sexual consent, more children's rights, increased funding of daycare rather than support for families, the abolition of corporal punishment and a wholesale dismantling of traditional society.

"It is an almost infallible rule that the more liberal a person on social and moral issues the more in favour they are of strict gun control. It is not that such people are malicious, simply that they are wrong. Dangerously wrong. Ignore the disease, misinterpret the diagnoses and then prescribe the wrong medicine."

-- Michael Coren, writing on "Blame the killer," Saturday in the Toronto Sun