Thread by @bernybelvedere

I've been having a good convo with @AlanLevinovitz and @SarahGrynpas about this piece, which, hilariously, I still haven't read. (No access.)

I want to make a quick point, a point I've made in the past, about how right-wing media sometimes sees itself.

nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/…

The author is being criticized for writing a paean to a virtue that he himself, as a shaper of NR's editorial vision, is manifestly not offering in his own pages.

But it is possible that this criticism rests on an assumption, an assumption that may or may not be correct: that the way entities like NR have decided to operate is a function of how they think the media *as a whole* should operate.

In other words, I don't know that we can reason backwards from "This is how NR chooses to do things: they basically only platform conservatives" to "This is how these NR architects think media as a whole should look like: only conservatives."

I think their narrow focus on *conservatism only* may instead be a function of what they see is lacking from the ecosystem. They see the liberal and leftist positions as being well covered already.

So they're happy to fit into their ideological skin more rigidly.

For example, the sites that do conservative reporting don't cover the breadth of issues that the "MSM" does—not because they lack the funds but because it's somewhat redundant.

The few sites that do genuine conservative reporting don’t tend to approach it from a parallel position to mainstream reporting. They approach it as a filling-in-the-gaps effort from the right. (Possibly, @thedispatch is an exception.)

The best way to view mainstream outlets is not as liberal ones, but as places populated by liberals, who are naturally going to veer in a liberal direction, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously.

Viewed this way, these publications aren't wittingly in the service of liberalism or progressivism, yet at the same time, elements of that orientation can’t help but act as a filter through which the journalistic operations are carried out.

In this sense, you could more accurately see conservative outlets as a desk within the larger mainstream media newsroom, like sports or entertainment, that exist to fill in the gaps and bring in eyes where there previously were blind spots.

So *of course* these conservative outlets are going to pursue stories conservative readers will want to read.

But they can still decry that *the system* is insufficiently open to a diversity of views—even while they themselves exclusively focus on conservative interests.