(FORTUNE Magazine) – We now return to a grievance not mentioned for several years but urgently needing a good groan in the present period. Gripe in question: the media's tendentious use of ''ideologue'' and ''pragmatist'' to characterize various personages struggling for influence in the Reagan White House. This may all look like a bit of a molehill to folks who haven't been counting, but those of us who live by Nexis know big numbers are involved. If you order this computerized database to spit out 1987 articles and news stories in which ideolog! appears within 30 words of White House, it will soon enough expectorate 431 citations through November 19. (The exclamation point serves as a wild card, enabling Nexis to search for the root word and any suffix, including, in this case, both ''ideologue'' and ''ideology.'') The figures on pragmatism are also quite impressive. White House pragmatists are usually named Baker. First it was James Baker, who is now Secretary of the Treasury but got most of his pragmatism points while serving as White House chief of staff (1981-85). Howard Baker, the present chief, is also formidably pragmatic. Nexis knows of 356 articles during the Reagan years in which Baker appears within 30 words of pragmati!. It is reasonable enough to think of ideologues and pragmatists as opposites. William James, who pioneered in elaborating the idea of pragmatism, kept explaining that it referred to a way of thinking in which people decide what's a good idea by reflecting on the practical consequences that would flow from its acceptance. An ideologue, by contrast, is religiously committed to his ideas and oblivious to evidence about them. But something funny happens to these philosophical distinctions when the White House press corps gets hold of them. Being mostly liberal, the newspersons tend to see your average Reaganite as a kindred spirit of Attila the Hun, oblivious to all evidence that his ideas are quite unsuitable, and therefore an ideologue. They also tend to see any White House character who seems uninterested in ideas, and just wants to cut a deal with Congress, as sensible and practical. And so soon enough they are matter-of-factly equating conservative ideas with ideology and the absence of ideas with pragmatism. ''The White House has been torn by policy disagreements for the last few weeks,'' wrote R. W. Apple in the New York Times of October 24, helpfully adding that the pragmatists were once again fighting ''the Reaganites, as the ideologues are known.'' In the past few months you have been reading (for example in the Christian Science Monitor of November 4) that resistance to tax increases is ideological. So is skepticism about the Arias peace plan in Central America (Washington Post, November 18). So is the widespread conservative belief in the utility of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Los Angeles Times, November 8). Bill Brock's departure as Secretary of Labor was an occasion (in the Los Angeles Times of November 10) for a reminder that Bill had not been an anti- union ideologue. Practically every reporter in Washington piled onto the $ Douglas Ginsburg Supreme Court nomination, which actually had about 12 different problems, as evidence of ideology run amok. And where are all the liberal ideologues? We offer only a partial clue: You basically won't find them in Nexis.