In a piece backing Barry Obama, carried of course as “straight news,” young Washington Post reporter Alec MacGillis opines:

Like Clinton, he favors expanding the government’s role in delivering health care, and would pay for that by ending President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. He would go a step further than Clinton by lifting the limit on income taxed for Social Security, now $100,000, to set that program on firm footing.

He strongly supports abortion rights and spoke out against a Supreme Court ruling last year that upheld a ban on the procedure that some call “partial-birth” abortion.

Young Alec adopts the language of the left while rejecting that of the center-right.

He tells us that Barry “has been endorsed by the activist group MoveOn.org.” The “activist group” ?!? They are fringe leftists, for gawdsake!

As his little piece ends. Young Alec laments 1988 Dem Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, complaing that “Republicans were able to paint the former Massachusetts governor, a relatively moderate technocrat, as a weak-willed lefty.” What about Dukakis was “relatively moderate”? His support for gun control? His support for the practice of abortion? His fiscal confiscatory and redistributionist tendencies? No, Dukakis was on the American left, and so is Barack Obama.

Young Alec’s bias does not belong on a page of a newspaper labeled without the warning label accompanying admitted opinion pieces. Of course, this is true of so much of what we read in the press.

(HT, Adam C.)