Guest Chats Are Getting Balanced; Online Columnists, Not So Much

washingtonpost.com is a vast enterprise that's almost impossible to describe in a single short post. But one recent trend contrasts with an old one: It's been providing balance in the selection of live-chat guests while retaining a sharp leftward tilt in the online staff.

Exhibit A is a packet of recent chats by Victor Davis Hanson, Fred Kagan, evangelical Richard Cizik. The search engine is failing me at the moment, but liberal guests include Todd Gitlin, who wrote a piece critizing Bush two Sundays ago, and on other occasions a perfectly useful lineup from the left side of the aisle.

Exhibit Compare-and-Contrast B is a staff that includes Dan Froomkin, Terry Neal,  and former The Nation writer Jefferson Morley. I can't think of a single conservative post.com columnist, at least not on beats that have anything to do with politics or culture.

Neal plays his role today by deciding that corpses are a rebuke only to the federal government generally and Bush specifically. And no column is complete without  Bush Lied People Died. Let's go to the videotape! Neal:

Polls show that the public is already increasingly weary of the president's character, largely because of the dubious claims he made in the march to war in Iraq and probably because of his failure to hold anyone accountable for the mistake made in selling the war as well as fighting it. But they won't soon forget the images coming out of New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast.