To the extent the journalistic concensus exists to some extent because of external reality conservatives have no need to oppose it--but then, liberal politicians are not about to, either. In such case no controversy exists and journalism would drop the issue from disinterest.
If one blind man touches the elephant's trunk and perceives a snake and another blind man feels the elephant's leg and perceives a tree, their courage to disagree ultimately allows someone to listen to the various reports and infer the elephant itself--the truth, at least approximately. But what if the second blind man--and the third--hearing the first report, each trims his report to avoid contradiction for fear of seeming "biased"? How long will we then "know objectively" that the creature is a snake??
And if a politician knows that you believe the snake hypothesis, is there not political profit in proposing a snake control program whether he himself believes it or not? And will not the blind men and the politicians then make common cause against the person who scents peanut breath and somehow ferrets out the truth?
"Liberalism" is a combination of cowardice and duplicity. It is the ideology of the feckless--the preference for group solidarity over truth. And it calls itself "objectivity."
There is a direct analogy between the press freedom and the First Amendment, on the one hand, and gun rights and the Second Amendment on the other. It is no accident that the same people who think guns make people too dangerous, also proclaim that the format of a printed article makes the fallibility of human opinion too dangerous.
By that I mean that one might take an article printed on the Editorial Page to be flawed but constitutionally protected opinion and yet to take the same article printed on the front page to be irresponsible and dangerous. In either case the article is in the public domain, and if the idea is dangerous it isn't made harmless for being put on the editorial page.
Jefferson and Hamilton waged political war in sponsored newspapers back when there was no such thing as an editorial page--meaning not that there was no editorial opinion in a paper but that nothing in the paper was "positioned" as being anything but human opinion. My brief against broadcast journalism is that it is "positioned" by the government as being "in the public interest."
The government must never be accorded the authority to define truth. Ever grant the government that right, and eternal incumbent protection will be "truth." But what we have now is similar, in that herd journalism gathers around an opinion and protects consensus and calls it "truth." I played a trick by responding to #41 rather than to your actual post number; the "TO 41" button goes to my analysis of liberal herd journalism already in the thread.
I agree with you that breaking ranks with other journalists is very dangerous. All you can hope to do is get into a shouting match with the other journalist, and your "objectivity" as well as the other's objectivity will be called into question. And if that weren't enough, all the other journalists will see your critique as being out-of-bounds, and your own credibiliy will be questioned by journalism at large, not just your target.
So even though non-journalists fear getting into an argument with you as a journalist who "buys ink by the barrel," you as an individual journalist must fear the pack as a whole, which collectively "buys ink by the truckload." And that IMHO deters journalists from competing on the basis of credibility. National Enquirer and Star excepted, of course. Journalists will not deign to be compared in veracity to them.