"Moderates" and "fundamentalists"

GetReligion's Mollie Ziegler flags a "truly horrible story" by a Reuters reporter, in which the reporter inadvertently discloses not only her ignorance of basic tenets of the Christian religion -- the reporter is under the impression that "Left Behind" theology is rampant in America because four out of five Christians believe in the Second Coming of Christ ... which is, of course, has been a basic tenet of the faith since the beginning -- but also her agenda. It comes with the use of the word "moderate" in the sense of "Christians I approve of, not like those awful fundamentalists." As Mollie points out, a reporter choosing to deploy the word "moderate" to describe the liberal side in an institutional conflict is loaded. She quotes NYTimes editor Bill Keller's 2005 instruction to his newsroom:

We must . . . be more alert to nuances of language when writing about contentious issues . . . the way the word “moderate” conveys a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme, the misuse of “religious fundamentalists” to describe religious conservatives . . .

That was a minor problem I had with the LA Times Rome bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson's book "The Vatican's Exorcists." Her book is not polemical, but she tips her hand by repeatedly calling Roman Catholics who actually believe in their church's teachings "fundamentalists." It's a perjorative and loaded description. There is a distinct subset of American Protestantism called "fundamentalism," and it proposes specific doctrines. You can't lift the phrase from its Protestant context and apply it to any conservative religious faction, or use it to describe the conservative side in a religious dispute. Besides, the word is so toxic in the US media environment that any time I see it, I assume that it tells us more about the reporter's worldview than it does the worldview of the faction labeled "fundamentalist" in the story.

Likewise with "moderate." A pet peeve of mine has been the way the mainstream media describe the rightward edge of the Democratic party in Congress as "conservative Democrats," but the leftward edge of the GOP in Congress as "moderate Republicans." Ever notice that? I nearly drove my car off the road the other day when I heard an NPR report describe the Blue Dog Democrats as "moderate." I literally have never heard or read that description applied to them. Frankly, I would call them conservative Democrats, as I would call the left-leaning Republicans "liberal Republicans" (except there aren't many of those left in Congress). If there are members who fall somewhere in the middle, those would be the moderates. Yes?