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Whenever I get asked about the news media's alleged liberal bias in coverage, I tell a simple little story. I was working at a small daily newspaper about 15 years ago and was asked to go cover a rally sponsored by an abortion rights group. It was held in an auditorium, and featured a number of speakers with about 200 supporters in the audience. I spoke to some of the leadership and the common everyday folks who were there to support a woman's right to choose.

On the way out, I noticed about a dozen pro-life protesters. I spoke to them as well, gained some opposition quotes, and went back to the office to write the story. Because the rally was an abortion rights rally, and because the abortion rights people far outnumbered the pro-life protesters, I included more quotes from the abortion rights people. When my editor read the first draft, I was told to remove some of the abortion rights quotes and move more pro-life quotes into the story. The story had to be completely even, I was told -- right down the middle.

And the reasoning behind this? We have some conservative readers, the editor told me, and we don't want to get a lot of letters-to the-editor from pro-lifers. What I learned from this episode was that the people running the media only fear one thing: pissing off anyone who buys the paper. Being liberal has nothing to do with the decisions being made.

I thought about this when I saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 movie on its first weekend in theaters. The crowd at the AMC Palace 9 in downtown Fort Worth was huge that night, a crowd that was no doubt a little more liberal than many, but not that radical in their appearance. But what made me really take notice was how theaudience responded at the end of the movie. They gave a standing ovation to a film that was against the war in Iraq. I've never been in a theater where that happened.

What is happening in this country is that a large group of citizens is beginning to question the Bush Administration's foreign policy, and the media is having difficulty dealing with it. Moore has been attacked as a liberal clown in some circles, a filmmaker who is self-aggrandizing, a guy who is throwing out ideas that are anti-American. Worse than that, Moore is mixing entertainment with serious political issues, a mix that the news media has always hated.

But the popularity of this movie indicates that the national media failed miserably in doing its job of questioning this war when it first began. It was obvious to many that Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and that this country in the Middle East was no real threat to the United States.

At the beginning of the war, the media was embedded with the troops and tended to report how great this action was for the American people. It was almost like they were covering sports, not saying much bad about the home team so that fans and the front office wouldn't get upset. We were shown troops rushing to Baghdad, putting an evil dictator on the run, freeing a people that had been abused by their government. One of the reasons the media strayed to this one-sided approach was because the polling numbers said the American people were on Bush's side. Those opposing were anti-American, folks who didn't support our troops, not good loyal fans.

But as it stands now, more than half of the people in this country don't think invading Iraq was such a good idea. And when the media covers some of these problems we're facing in Iraq and the rest of the world, they find themselves on the fence. Print a story about American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and you get letters from conservative people claiming such news reports are helping the enemy. Show photos of private citizens getting beheaded by terrorists, and the Iraqi war supporters claim the media is glorifying these evil assassins.

It is important to be balanced on such a complicated issue. But the media needs to realize that those opposing this war are not anti-American. Nor are they necessarily John Kerry supporters. What Michael Moore has done is to articulate a viewpoint that has been largely ignored in the conventional media until just recently. I don't agree with everything Moore put in his movie, but his views are not anti-American. Quite the contrary. People who think this war was poorly thought out, poorly planned, and causing foreign policy problems throughout the world do care about this country. Being able to express that is one of the foundations of our democracy.

Perhaps that is why I stood and cheered Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore's major point is that this country should never put our troops in harm's way on a mission that is relatively meaningless. What might happen from this movie is that the conventional media may see the popularity of Moore's opinionated film and realize that many people agree with him. Perhaps they'll see that, in bottom line terms, it's safe for them to cover the anti-war movement because, indeed, lots of their readers probably share those views.

If the editors get nasty letters, so what? This isn't the same as covering the home sports team. Pushing aside the movement that opposes this war is a dereliction of journalistic duty. Complaints from readers is part of striving for truth. And offending some groups -- both sides of an issue -- is just part of the territory.

Dan McGraw is a local freelance journalist and author.