I lost link because I opened the tab to read later, but a comment in the blog post about leftist radical capture caught my eye. Here it is:
+++++++++++++++++++++
I’m a conservative who has more or less fled/seceded/abandoned all the “neutral” institutions. I’ve done so basically for the reasons you outline- they’ve become intolerably left-wing in practice and they have made it clear they have no intent of ever giving my side a fair shake.
(side note: What you term “Conquest’s Third Law” is usually called O’Sullivan’s Law by conservatives, after John O’Sullivan, former National Review editor and Thatcher aide:
https://web.archive.org/web/2003070...lreview.com/flashback/flashback-jos062603.asp)
The issue is not and never has been one of facts. There is sufficient journalistic integrity at CNN, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that they are very rarely wrong on a matters of simple fact, and the factual mistake they do make are typically corrected with the appropriate amount of diligence and embarrassment. The issues with “gatekeeper” media are more commonly
– value judgments presented as facts, or more commonly statements that are true only if one accepts an implicit (and obviously progressive/liberal) value judgement.
– related: dubious claims or assumptions of causality (good example: The idea that poverty causes crime is almost always assumed to be so obviously true in news reporting that it’s never even presented as a potential point of dispute). This is probably the worst problem, precisely because these are the exact places where liberals tend to dig in their heels the most and accuse conservatives of “denying facts”, when the “fact” in question is not a fact but a disputed claim of causality.
– the choice of which facts to present, which to omit, and how such facts are organized in the narrative (this of course includes the choice of which stories are stories and which are “not a story”). I personally stopped reading the NYT about a decade ago when I hit my limit on reading articles that, somewhere around the 14th paragraph, would mention a fact that completely demolished the entire premise of the article, but that the author would just glaze over and keep on going as if the premise was still valid
– obvious double standards in how they treat D and R politicians (anytime there’s a scandal, if the pol is an R then it’s a dollars-to-donuts bet that “Republican” will be in the headline. If it’s a D, then (D-NY) will appear around the fifth paragraph)
– related, the obvious double standard in which stories embarrassing to conservatives are gleefully given prominent space and stories embarrassing to liberals are covered reluctantly in less-prominent places, and always, always presented “with context”
– obvious double standards in how activist groups, think-tanks, and other groups are presented (e.g., a place like the Heritage Foundation will always be called “the conservative Heritage Foundation” whereas a place like the Center for American Progress will usually just be “the Center for American Progress” without any label indicating they are left-wing
– where terminology is disputed, the liberal-preferred terminology will always be treated as normative and conservative-preferred terminology will usually get scare-quotes
– The common use of scare quotes and other rhetorical methods to insinuate that conservatives are making arguments in bad faith without openly making the accusation. This is probably the second-worst problem because it makes clear the news source doesn’t take you seriously and wants to convey to its audience that it shouldn’t either, which when done sub-rosa is extremely dirty journolistic practice. It’s impossible to have a productive argument with someone who refuses to acknowledge that you mean what you say, and that how you say it reflects how you conceive of the issue.
– The indirect, dishonest editorializing method of quoting progressive activists at length, un-rebutted, in “news analysis” pieces and then pretending that the article author and editor don’t obviously agree with the activist and that the purpose of the article wasn’t just to push that line.
– Absolutely everything ever written by Linda Greenhouse
– The preposterous ignorance of extremely basic tenets of orthodox Christian theology, especially in articles that are about church-related things
– The method of rigging an argument by going to the dumbest, platitude-spewing hack possible to present the conservative side (the only thing in the world worse than arguing with an idiot is having to watch an idiot argue your side)
– The recurring genre of articles about conservatives that read like (and are roughly as inaccurate as) freshman-level anthropological studies of some primitive Amazonian tribe, with no comparable examinations of liberals
– the complete predictability that the “angle” they will take on a story will always manage to work in the progressive issue du jour (there’s an ancient conservative joke that the day after the apocalypse, the NYT headline will read “World Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit”)
– In the specific case of TV, it’s common to be able to easily detect from the verbal tone, facial expression, and mannerisms when the anchor wants the audience to know what the “right” and “wrong” sides of an argument are (Liberals, to get what I mean here: consider Brit Hume. As a news anchor, he always presented the content of a news story in the classic, objective, just-the-facts, old-school news anchor style. But you didn’t need poker-pro facial-expression-recognition skills to know that he’s conservative and considered the conservative take to be correct, and no doubt his presentation of the liberal side would grate on you in a hard-to-pin-down way. Liberal anchors are just as obvious to, and have the same effect on, conservatives)
None of the above gripes are in any way new; they’re the exact same gripes conservatives have had for two generations, and every single one of them is still repeated on a nearly daily basis. It’s as if liberal newspeople read the list of conservative gripes and then decided “wow, this is actually a really effective way to be biased and pretend not to be, let’s actively try to do this now” (yes, yes, I know that quite obviously this did not happen anywhere, that there’s no actual conspiracy. My point is that there doesn’t need to be and the results are almost indistinguishable). At some point it’s not worth sticking around in hopes they get better and that giving them your money and ad-market share just makes you a sucker.
Roberts’s “conservatives have never asked for institutional reform” shtick is the exact sort of historical ignorance that infuriates conservatives (and is so, so perfectly Vox that it’s kind of funny). Complaining about “gatekeeper” media bias has been a staple part of conservative media as long as there’s been conservative media. Buckley was complaining about it as far back as the 60’s. It’s been an arrow in Rush Limbaugh’s quiver since the 80’s. 15 years ago this book was a #1 best-seller for two months and got enough attention that a president did this to fire a shot across the media’s collective bow. The very existence of the “public editor” position at the NYT was a response to when, right as media bias was a hot topic due to the reaction to that book and entire websites devoted to OCD-level bias checking of the NYT, the Jayson Blair scandal happened to them. For Roberts to be completely ignorant of that is, well, a perfect anecdote illustrating why conservatives have such contempt for Vox.
Speaking of Vox, that people would treat an organization run by the Journ-o-lister in chief (Don’t know what the Journ-o-list is? Welcome to the world of “you’ve just proven my point about media bias”) as even plausibly a neutral gatekeeper is also exactly the sort of thing that makes conservatives livid.
