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A group of conservative bloggers – not to mention folks like Sean Hannity – are upset over some nasty comments that were posted in the comments section of the liberal Huffington Post Web site in the wake of the bombing near Vice President Cheney. A number of commenters expressed their disappointment that Cheney hadn't been killed.

The dustup sheds a light on an unfortunate habit of partisans on both sides, who love to publicize nasty rhetoric in order to illustrate the wrong-headedness of their ideological opponents. You might call it the Ward Churchill strategy. Churchill, as you may know, is a (once) obscure professor who wrote a ridiculous essay comparing the victims of the September 11th attacks to Nazis. As I noted in CJR Daily in 2005, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly decided that the Churchill affair was a huge story – he covered it an astounding 25 times in a four-month period.

Churchill is the kind of guy who makes liberals look like wackos – just like the commenters who expressed sadness when the vice president wasn't killed. There is a reason partisans might want to think twice before employing the Ward Churchill strategy, however – a reason aside from the inherent intellectual dishonesty of shining a light on unimportant figures in order to push an agenda. There are Ward Churchills on both sides, after all, as a visit to the comments section of a site like Free Republic quickly reveals. And I'm not sure how getting into a your-freaks-are-worse-then-ours tit-for-tat benefits anyone in the long run.

Over at Newsbusters, Tim Graham has used David Duke's recent appearance on CNN to make a point. (Here's the video of the appearance, which I can't recommend enough.) Writes Graham: "Conservatives have often been outraged that liberals would suggest Duke was one of them, when he always appears in the liberal media, and not on conservative talk radio." Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana state representative, recently appeared at a "two-day gathering of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists" in Tehran.

Graham is somewhat overreaching by tying his point to the Blitzer interview, as CNN did not link Duke to Republicans, opting instead to focus largely on his KKK past. But there are legitimate questions to be asked about news organizations propping up polarizing extremists who could be seen to represent people far more in the mainstream. Graham has given us an example from the right, so here's one from the left: Ward Churchill, an obscure, far-left University of Colorado professor who, as I noted in May of last year, was covered 25 times in a four-month period on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Neither Ward Churchill or David Duke can be said to represent anyone other than themselves and a small, fringe group of people of negligible importance. The question for news outlets is to what degree these people should be given a platform. They undeniably make for good television, which is why even folks like Fred Phelps get on the air. But they do not articulate views that represent the views of more than a small sliver of Americans. There's no question that it's important to pay attention to extremists if their ranks start growing or if there are other reasons we need to take them seriously. (It's important to cover people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, because of their political power.) But it's hard to see a justification for grabbing the loudest wacko from off the street corner and putting him in front of a camera.

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