Oh joy. I’ve been misquoted by Dana Milbank. Today’s “Washington Sketch” column in the WashPost reports on the conference by Rev. Rick Scarborough’s Vision America group in northwest DC yesterday, where I was on a panel about liberal media bias against Christians. “We’re making some great inroads,” he reports me as saying. Actually, that was said by Bill Fancher of American Family Radio, talking about the White House press corps. I certainly don’t see “great inroads” there, based on my recent job experience there.

Milbank has fun with the theme that all the anti-Christian media bias examples were stale, even though Don Irvine of AIM did whack at the Oscar exclusions of The Passion and Narnia. I will confess I didn’t prepare for the panel by creating a list of current examples. I find that at these panels, any well-known proofs of bias will be used by the other panelists, and I don’t want to ruin their presentations by pronouncing them first. I also find that conference attendees generally don’t like lectures you read. I tried to stay generic and talk about general trends (surveys showing overwhelming social liberalism in the press, labeling imbalance between the religious right and the libertine left). Does Milbank think the evangelical audience needed evidence to convince them that the media’s hostile to their worldview?

Milbank and other liberals always want us to acknowledge we have Rush, and the Internet, and Fox News. It’s true that the conservative viewpoint gets more of an airing in America. But that doesn’t excuse the so-called “objective” media from any attempt at objectivity. They want to insist that they’re the “professionals.” So they can’t fend off charges of bias by saying “Look at Rush, look at Rush.” They have to produce fair and balanced news reports people can trust. And that doesn’t happen when you misquote people and misrepresent what they said.