The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus responds to some criticism of her complaints about the Obama administration's "'dumb' war with Fox News":

My observations about the Obama administration's “dumb” war with Fox News seem to have touched a nerve -- 868 nerves, going by the latest tally of comments. They ran the gamut from “another idiotic column” to “Amen, Ruth.” I confess, I didn't read them all, but I got the drift. Meanwhile, the 869th nerve belonged to my lefty friend Chuck, who emailed, complete with links to angry liberal bloggers, to bemoan my “false equivalency” between Fox News and MSNBC.

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One of my sentences provoked particular derision from the left. “Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC,” I wrote. I confess to having forgotten about the Bush administration's public tangle last year with MSNBC.

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For the record, Chuck, I don't think that Fox and MSNBC are equivalent. Fox is more over the line, more often.

While Marcus brought up the criticism she received for drawing a “false equivalency” between Fox News and MSNBC, she didn't actually respond to it. She did acknowledge at the end that MSNBC isn't as bad as Fox News, but she still suggests MSNBC is a liberal cable channel. That follows her original post, in which Marcus wrote:

Certainly Fox tends to report its news with a conservative slant -- but has anyone at the White House clicked over to MSNBC recently? Or is the only problem opinion journalism that doesn't match its opinion?

Marcus didn't address that line in her second post, but it's as silly as her false suggestion that the Bush administration never pulled a “hissy fit with MSNBC.”

MSNBC is the home of Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews. Their hosts and reporters regularly traffic in conservative misinformation and -- wittingly or not -- adopt conservative frames for their reports. The fact that they also employ a handful of journalists who lean to the left does not mean it is a liberal channel, any more than CNN's embrace of Lou Dobbs means it is a right-wing channel.

The fact-free insistence by journalists like Marcus that MSNBC is a left-wing news organization does as much to skew public discourse to the right as does Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.