In yesterday's column about the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times' David Carr noted some ways in which the paper's coverage has leaned to the right since Rupert Murdoch took over:

Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits - "health care reform" is a generally forbidden phrase - and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride.

As I noted yesterday, that's a tendency that is common to media not owned by Rupert Murdoch, too.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein provided a much fuller explanation of this concept in a bog post yesterday yesterday morning:

By now, you're probably used to hearing about the $900 billion health-care bill. But what about the 150,000-life health-care bill?

Oddly, that label hasn't made its way into the conversation. But it is, if anything, a conservative estimate.

...

We're very comfortable talking about the financial cost of health-care reform. We're less comfortable talking about the human benefits.

...

But we don't like to talk about it that way. Occasionally, people justify this methodologically: It's too hard, they say, to know exactly how many people die because they don't have access to health insurance. But projecting the cost of the bill is no easier, or more certain, and yet we use those numbers with impunity.

In reality, people don't like to talk about health-care reform in terms of lives because it seems, on some level, unfair. It sounds almost like an accusation of murder. That's common rhetoric when talking about wars but not social policy.

But it isn't an accusation of murder. It's a statement of benefits. And there are iterations in which the costs could outweigh the benefits: The money could do much more good elsewhere, say, or the regulations would thoroughly impede medical innovation. That's an argument worth having, but it should be had. As it is, we talk about the costs in very specific terms and the benefits in very abstract terms. That biases the discussion toward the opposition and against, well, the 150,000 or so people whose lives would be saved by by this bill.

That is exactly right, and it applies to far more than health care. And it's why the reaction from some quarters to another Klein post, in which he described Joe Lieberman's willingness to kill health care reform as “caus[ing] the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people," was so predictable.

Klein's Post colleague Charles Lane flipped out, posting a bizarre rant in which he stipulated that health care reform would save lives and stipulated that Lieberman was opposing it out of a desire for revenge, but blew a gasket at Klein's willingness to spell out that opposing reform would cost lives. Lane's conclusion -- that Lieberman is opposing reform out of spite, even though reform would save lives, but that Klein is the one whose actions are “beyond the pale,” because he said what Lieberman is doing -- demonstrates just how uncomfortable many journalists are talking about the effects of legislation.

And then Martin Peretz of The New Republic weighed in. Note that Peretz didn't really address the substance of anything; he just sputtered on about how rude Klein was to his longtime associate Joe Lieberman, as his longtime associate Charles Lane had argued.

See, it's fine for politicians -- and media figures -- to point to the negative consequences of legislation when those consequences are higher taxes on the rich, or deficits. You see dire warnings of these things all the time, and nobody bats an eye. But when you warn of other consequences -- lives lost, for example -- that's “beyond the pale.” (And no, Charles Lane, this is not just like “Death Panels.” Death panels don't exist. People dying without health care do.)

That, as Klein noted, biases the discussion towards those who dislike taxes and social programs.