Media only makes Tiller story worse

I don't know if I have ever agreed with Brent Bozell.

Until now.

Bozell is about as far to the right as they come. He ghosted Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative," and his Media Research Center is a right-wing "media watchdog" that continually whines about the so-called "liberal media."

I read his weekly column, just as I read Ann Coulter's column and some of Rush Limbaugh's transcripts. I think it's important to be aware of what the other side is saying.

But in his column this week, Bozell made a lot of sense. He wrote about the media reaction to the shooting of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas, and he started with this:

"In the very heart of the pro-life community, there is nothing they wanted less than another shooting of an abortionist."

He's right, of course. Recent polls show somewhat of a change in the country, with 51 percent now saying they think abortion is wrong. Of course, this is one of those issues where you can ask the same question different ways and get very different responses. Try asking whether a woman and her doctor should make the decision or if the government should force women to have babies and you won't get 51 percent.

Still, there are tens of millions of people in this country who believe abortion is wrong.

I'm one of them, as I have explained before.

But not only would very few people kill an abortionist, most of them wouldn't even think it was a good thing that he was murdered.

You see, at the heart of this whole abortion thing is "Thou shalt not kill." That means everyone, not just the babies. I think most folks see the death of Tiller as relatively meaningless to the number of abortions performed; someone else will take his place as long as abortions are legal.

But Bozell's point, and it's a good one, is that Tiller's death hurts the pro-life movement far more than it helps. Once again the media is talking about religious fanatics. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, who ordinarily I like very much, spoke of a "religious Jihad by fundamentalist crusaders."

Coulter, who is way crazier than Bozell, wrote in her column that Tiller had bragged of performing "more than 60,000 abortions." She also pointed out that for all the furor about killing doctors, Tiller was only the fifth abortionist killed since the enactment of Roe v. Wade nearly 40 years ago.

Don't get me wrong here. Five is still five too many. There's no reason to kill doctors, but five in all this time is probably no more than any other random sampling of people killed by lunatics over the same period.

This issue is a little bit like the Middle East, with two irreconcilable positions. You're never going to get hard-core pro-choicers to agree abortion should be banned, and you'll never get hard-core pro-lifers to say it isn't murder.

But is it too much to ask the media not to stir things up more than it already does? Do we really need people looking at fundamentalist Christians as if they're as dangerous as Osama bin Laden?

Frankly, no.

In the Tiller case, we ran up against the media's longtime "if it bleeds it leads" mantra. I'd rather the media adopted a slogan that's far older, from the oath doctors take.

"First, do no harm."