that makes sense to me, but i'm having a hard time reading that as something other than a bad-faith attack intended to force a rebuttal, which i think people tend to respond poorly to for what i assume are obvious reasons

Yeah I agree if you got up in a reporter’s face with this formulation it would not be constructive. But the shorthand has effectively caused a lot of people to default to side-eying mainstream political coverage. I don’t know if we get to the “sanewashing” breakthrough without it.