IOW, the nature of journalism is to emphasize the superficial and the negative, and that produces a genre of nonfiction which conservatives are philosophically ill-suited to write. Conservatives don't decide to spend their lives writing that kind of stuff, and anticonservative people do.Anticonservatism is the planted axiom of journalism.
Cronkite Gets Candid
Trouble is, by and large the people are lazy enough to let a Walter Cronkite do that for them. And a Walter Cronkite only exists when the government suppresses his competition. The FCC created broadcasting by suppressing competition from all but a few licensees, and by a "fairness doctrine" which in fact transferred the "establishment" nature of NY Times journalism to broadcasting, magnifying it with the imprimatur of the government.
If you sued the FCC over the issue of broadcast journalism's leftist bias, journalism would fight a PR war against you. And most judges--most Supreme Court justices--would be tempted to truckle to journalism for fear of negative, and hope of positive, "ink." But on the merits, the fact that broadcast journalism agrees with print journalism is no defense against a charge of bias--the First Amendment protection of the press makes the press presumptively irresponsible. If you can't be forbidden to say what you think, what you say can be wrong.
But since the FCC does have the obligation to apply "public interest" criteria to its licensees, there will aways be the temptation to discriminate against the speech of the honest--who lay out their perspective openly, announcing that they are conservative--and in favor of the arrogant and sneaky, who insinuate (and may be foolish enough to believe) that they are "middle of the road."
And why does the FCC have the obligation to judge what is broadcast? Simply because it engages in unconstitutional censorship in order to create the centralized broadcasting stations which you have the right to shut up and listen to, but no right (in unconstitutional FCC law) to compete with. In constitutional principle, then, the FCC should be abolished or, failing that, subjected to strict scrutiny to assure equality of access to government assistance in publishing speech. An obligation which, if enforced, would presumably look like a C-Span open phones session without rationing of conservative calls. That is, conservative speech would predominate.
Given the left-wing disposition of print journalism, the judges who enforced any such regimen would be subject to the sort of calumny that only Clarence Thomas has heretofore endured. The issue is whether the court could craft and enforce a remedy which would insulate it from the resulting undue influence . . .