This article by Conor Friedersdorf has gotten a lot of (well deserved) guff for its silly complaints about rent control, but I think people are missing a rather interesting point:
But a political movement cannot survive on commentary and analysis alone!
Were there only as talented a cadre of young right-leaning reporters dedicated to the journalistic project. The nation's English departments, journalism schools, and mainstream publications teem with talented young liberal reporters who, for all their biases and blind spots, regularly produce stunning narrative writing. It certainly persuades me to embrace certain of their positions on occasion, or at least to modify my own. Will the next generation of left-leaning journalists continue to dominate the stories we tell ourselves as a society, as surely as their ideological cohorts dominate The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Newsweek today? Will liberals continue to produce the bulk of reportage in America, to pen the most ambitious literary non-fiction, and to miss relevant facts and narratives that a reporter more versed in right-leaning political philosophy would've caught?
Man, what a crazy idea! Journalists who practice journalism! Conservatives often complain that people can move from magazines like the Prospect to more mainstream publications like the New York Times, while it's much harder to do the same thing if you write for, for instance, The Weekly Standard. But it's important to point out that this isn't because of liberal bias or whatever, it's because, with a few exceptions, conservative publications are much more interested in polemics than reporting. As Friedersdorf says, they see themselves as fighting against the whole practice of journalism:
Put another way, the right must conclude that we're better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it. Making this judgment means exhibiting confidence that we are correct more often than not. It means believing that our arguments are not merely relevant, but true. It means trusting that, when examined, the facts and stories of the world will bear out our ideas. Fate has not declared that right-leaning publications shall never be read by liberals. Nor is there a decree that all unaffiliated publications are de facto liberal. Yet as long as the right continues to believe this -- and act accordingly -- it will, I fear, continue to be true.
I think Friedersdorf is right about all of this, but I doubt many in the conservative movement will agree. The problem for them is that conservatism has long survived by refusing to deal with the fact that many of their core positions on the issues are deeply unpopular. In the past, they've dealt with this by obscuring the real reasons they want to enact various policies. This is why, for instance, you see pieces like The Weekly Standard's famous article dishonestly linking Saddam Hussein to 9-11. But you can't really get away with that and be taken seriously as journalists at the same time.
In the long run though it would probably be better for the health of the Republican party at least if it honestly confronted the relative unpopularity of a lot of it's ideas (that's the central point of David Frum's Comeback). A more journalism-minded conservative media would help with that. What's more, Friedersdorf is right that the world would be a better place if conservative media was read by liberals and vice versa and each side didn't assume the mainstream media is irretrievably biased against it. Similarly, it'd be nice to have two reality-based parties instead of one.
In any event, the important point is that the nature of conservative media is an overlooked part of the larger debate over the future of conservatism that's suddenly omnipresent.
--Sam Boyd
