The Conservative Conscience, Pt 1

Some of my conservative friends have criticized me recently for seeming too reflexively liberal, whereas I once seemed more middle of the road. I do want to offer some perspective, mainly due to my frustrations regarding where I feel conservatives have overreached.

One area that keeps coming up is the issue of "media bias," where even the relatively conservative Economist magazine decries conservatives' fascination with "diabolical conspiracies against ordinary citizens."

The simple irony is this: The more biased you may be, the more outraged you will be by someone else's bias. Most people don't worry so much about media bias; they expect reporters to be a little liberal, the way they expect businesspersons to be a little conservative. It comes with the territory. The only people who really decry it as a conspiracy are staunch conservatives and staunch liberals. Both of them howl about how the media is in bed with establishment forces.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is reading the articles about how best to prepare a Thanksgiving turkey.

In another irony, many staunch conservatives of the talk-radio stripe have openly mocked the "dying" MSM for years, ridiculing it as "dead-tree media" that has been supplanted by blogs and talk-radio. They've insisted that the MSM is useless; now that Sen. McCain has lost, they are blaming it on the MSM.

I think the MSM does work to keep their biases in check: it's called "opinion-suppressive reporting." Conservatives decry it as "secret bias," so the MSM just can't win.

Many conservatives get angry that they don't get their talking points on the MSM, so they condemn it. But that condemnation comes from conservatives' own rigid agenda, not from an evil conspiracy on the part of those who don't feel that they need to follow that agenda. To me, all these resentments are a parallel to so many minority groups' common complaints that they're not the captains of their own destiny, and that their fates are being manipulated by external forces. I'm just surprised that ideological conservatives don't see the irony.