EJ Dionne has a sorrowful column today on the “electronic” media’s baleful decision to over-cover the townhall protests. He writes:

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?
There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view “boring”) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.
It’s also clear that the anger that got so much attention largely reflects a fringe right-wing view opposed to all sorts of government programs most Americans support. Much as the far left of the antiwar movement commanded wide coverage during the Vietnam years, so now are extremists on the right hogging the media stage — with the media’s complicity.

Now there’s probably some merit in there and there’s some overstatement as well. I urge the Columbia Journalism School to convene a panel forthwith to sort all of that out.

But what I really like is E.J.’s tut-tutting tone about those naive and myopic electronic media types who fell for these alleged stunts. This is the same E.J. Dionne who not two weeks ago was fretting the “politics of the jackboot,” warning that these townhall meetings were the manifestation of some sort of crypto-fascist uprising of angry white militias. No, wait, maybe that was the column two weeks before that, in which he urged the GOP to purge the dangerous “extremists” in its midst. Whatever.

The point is that Dionne is partly responsible for the electronic media’s coverage of the town hall meetings. Look at it this way. If you’re a typical TV news producer who takes columnists like Dionne and Krugman seriously, then of course you’re going to cover these potent powder kegs of the paranoid style. Who knows what might happen in these beer town halls?

Meanwhile, most conservative columnists insisted these protests were little more than democracy in action. Politically significant, to be sure, but not something to fret over. If the producers listened to us instead of Dionne & Co., would the town halls get less overage? I think the answer is obviously yes. Would that coverage be more evenhanded? Again, the answer is obviously yes. It’s fine for E.J. to bemoan the TV coverage of the town halls, but it’d be nice if he owned up to the fact that he was part of the problem.

Update: Matt Welch beat me to the punch.