Although there are ever-shifting power groups within governing bodies and even among the nexus of the political leadership, the politically active uppermost classes, and the policy / think / PR groups hired by them, still, processes such as naming and characterizing policies by such ideologically loaded terms are very powerful.

"Bipartisanship", I agree, represents a continual move to push for policies much friendlier to the conservative / hawk crowd.

I remember the NAFTA debate, of a bill originating with the then-PRI dictator of Mexico Carlos Salinas and building with George Bush Sr., and then pushed onto Clinton by a coalition of business and investment leaders, who then ran with it, and it passed by a strong Republican majority and a minority of (typically more conservative) Democrats against and over a majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate.

Yet it was the 'trade' (really investment) agreement's opponents who were portrayed as partisan, 'captured' by labor, Luddite, primitive, 'protectionist' (another useful media term), and maybe even discriminating against Mexicans, even though opponents had a majority of Mexican independent trades unions on their side.

But if this typical use of the "bipartisan" notion (getting enough Democrats to support Republican policies) falls out of favor, it will likely because the phrases fail to be effective at their task, and not because it's intellectually dishonest and not supported by evidence.

There are many others which get frequently employed. Here's one I thought interesting: "Hardliners".

A golden oldie from the ancient land of 1994, courtesy of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting:

With the Clinton White House backing Yeltsin's every move, including ultimately the assault on Russia's "White House," U.S. reporters abandoned even the pretense of objectivity. "Hard-liners" became the universal description for the leaders of parliament, who were rarely quoted explaining their reasons for opposing Yeltsin. As the Russian parliament burned, the Christian Science Monitor declared, in a front-page news article (10/5/93), that "it was clear that the government of President Boris Yeltsin had little choice but to respond with overwhelming force."...

http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/yeltsin-hardline.html

At the time (and the same is true today), I was no USSR / Russia expert who could quickly characterize each party under discussion. But even I noted how profoundly weird that nearly all the major news media, whose anchors and reporters similarly knew almost nothing of the USSR's / Russia's inner players, all quickly adopted this "hardliner" notion, and used that along with "coup-plotters" so much you almost forgot that before that flurry of news coverage that these words were not usually used every day.

I remember watching news of Yeltsin "dissolving" the legislature by shelling the Russian White House with tanks, and wondering, who are the "hardliners" again?

And from MondoWeiss (Phillip Weiss), a more recent contrast:

We all agree that Joe Biden was is in Munich for an international security conference. We all agree that he spoke about the new direction in US foreign policy. But that's all USA and the rest of the world can agree on because opinions about the content of his speech vary depending on who is reporting it. Let's compare the headlines:

Guardian: Obama administration offers olive branch to Russia and Iran

Al-Jazeera: US softens foreign policy stance

Press TV/Iran: The US vice president: US will integrate 'change' with its foreign policy

Voice of America: Biden: US Willing to Talk to Iran

Yahoo News: Biden vows break with Bush era foreign policy

This is how the world interprets Biden's policy speech in Munich. Now let's turn to the US's paper of record...

New York Times: Laying Out Foreign Policy Agenda, Biden Takes a Hard Line

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/02/nyt-gives-hardline-spin-to-bidens-speech-in-munich.html

In the first example, it was truly evil to be a hardliner. In the second, it's admirable.

And the way to tell which is good and which is bad is 'who is suggested to be lined up with and lined up against U.S. foreign policy hawks?'

The anti-Yeltsin hardliners were bad, because they opposed such things as the economic programs recommended by the Harvard Institute for International Development's Russia project, then the U.S.-media touted heroes of recommending bold capitalist reform and deregulation, an organization later to collapse in scandal for graft and corruption, and about whom the irresponsible fringe critics dismissed by our media were yet again entirely correct all along.

In 1996, the GAO found that U.S. oversight over Harvard was "lax," and, following allegations in 1997 that Shleifer and the other Harvard principals used their positions and inside knowledge as advisers to profit from investments in Russia, the U.S. government cancelled the last $14 million earmarked for Harvard. Shleifer, now [2000] under investigation by the Justice Department, was dismissed by HIID. (Still, Shleifer, who is a protégé of Treasury Secretary Summers, received the Clark Award from the American Economic Association this year, an award that Summers, who has been the architect of economic policy toward Russia, received in 1993. The association's president-elect, Dale Jorgenson, said Shleifer's scandal "was not even mentioned" in their considerations -- New York Times, 4/26/99.)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1018

So this is another one of those media frenzy phrases that ought perk the ears up -- just like 'fringe', partisan, leftist, heartland, ordinary, and so forth.

It's not that important, it's not as central to represent media ideology as the "bipartisan" term. But I think it's a frequent enough employed term to be interesting.