Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic has a great piece on why so many conservative "news outlets" got the election wrong:
- MSNBC? A former Republican Congressman hosts a three-hour morning news show (which, in case you're wondering, is three hours more than any liberal hosts a show on Fox News).
- New York Times? David Brooks and Ross Douthat have regular columns in the Op-Ed pages.
- Washington Post? Same with Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, George Will...
I ask again, where are the liberals in conservative media? Alan Colmes? Sure, he makes a token appearance from time-to-time on Fox News but it's not like he hosts his own TV show anymore (and even then, it was Hannity & Colmes). Thomas Frank? Nope, not with the Wall Street Journal anymore, and even when he was, his column printed less frequently than Brooks or Douthat do with the New York Times.
I'm not saying conservative media should swing to the ideological middle. There is a need for both, objective and partisan media. However, if you only offer your viewers partisanship without an intellectually honest counterpoint, you're likely to end up in the exact same place the Republican Party is sitting in today. And in the long term that's not good for the party or for the country.
"It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear."This brings me to something I noticed a few years ago and never could find an answer for it. Where are the liberals in conservative media? Conservative Media always blames the mainstream media as having a liberal bias. Think of the "liberal media" for a second:
- MSNBC? A former Republican Congressman hosts a three-hour morning news show (which, in case you're wondering, is three hours more than any liberal hosts a show on Fox News).
- New York Times? David Brooks and Ross Douthat have regular columns in the Op-Ed pages.
- Washington Post? Same with Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, George Will...
I ask again, where are the liberals in conservative media? Alan Colmes? Sure, he makes a token appearance from time-to-time on Fox News but it's not like he hosts his own TV show anymore (and even then, it was Hannity & Colmes). Thomas Frank? Nope, not with the Wall Street Journal anymore, and even when he was, his column printed less frequently than Brooks or Douthat do with the New York Times.
I'm not saying conservative media should swing to the ideological middle. There is a need for both, objective and partisan media. However, if you only offer your viewers partisanship without an intellectually honest counterpoint, you're likely to end up in the exact same place the Republican Party is sitting in today. And in the long term that's not good for the party or for the country.
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