The Right and Journalism

Laura McGann has an interesting story in The Washington Monthly about conservative efforts to get into the reporting game:

But with Democrats back in power and the fourth estate in shambles, conservatives are starting to discover the virtues of shoe-leather reporting, and are throwing their organizational savvy and financial clout behind sustained investigative ventures. The Franklin Center, which is run by a Republican political consultant with no journalism background, supports ten state-level investigative news sites under the moniker Watchdog.org. Meanwhile, free-market state-based think tanks have begun hiring reporters to work in-house, focusing on local and state spending—in the last six months alone, they have brought at least eighteen reporters on board.

To ruin the punchline, though, the subhead asks of these new outlets “can their reporting survive their politics?” and the answer seems to be “no, it can’t.” Or, rather, what’s going on is basically continuous with the idea of opposition research as practiced by political campaigns rather than journalism as practiced by good reporters. Opposition research activities can bring actual new factual information to light, and thus have some real value, but the problem with them is that since the conclusion (“my opponent is a bad person”) comes before the reporting, there are large incentives to present facts in a misleading rather than informative way.

That said, unlike most liberals who write about politics for a living, I don’t have any particular investment in the alleged high ideals of “real” journalism and “real” reporting and whatnot. The real issue facing conservative media, as I see it, is that it’s not totally clear to me whether conservatives actually want accurate information about how the world is. This is really the point of recent controversies about David Frum and “epistemic closure” and Mark Levin and all the rest. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck aren’t merely propaganda outlets that spew misinformation out into the world, they actively mislead the conservative audience about what’s going on. As long as that’s the ethic of conservative media, then it’s difficult to see valuable reporting or research of any kind happening.