The missing right-of-center media

1) Liberals are open-minded sorts who love to read and watch across a wide diversity of outlets, while most conservatives are conformist sheep who are not only content but delighted to get literally all of their political coverage from a single Ailes-ian source.

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2) Outlets that mix political and cultural coverage, whether a Slate or a New Yorker or an NPR, are mostly read by members of the liberal clerisy — academics, teachers, lawyers, other journalists — whereas well-educated and well-informed conservatives are often businessmen (note the Wall Street Journal’s near-center position) whose reading interests are more practical and professional, who don’t cultivate a member-of-the-intelligentsia self-image, and who treat their media consumption mostly as a source of information rather than identity. (Differential fertility rates between liberals and conservatives, and the lack of leisure/reading time associated with raising kids, might also play a role in this divide.)

3) The media business is so determinedly liberal, in personnel and leadership alike, that it’s missing a huge business opportunity, a huge potential audience, because there’s nobody interested in staffing or funding the kind of outlets that might win audiences in the space that Fox News currently bestrides. (As a corollary, the few investors who might fund such outlets tend to be very partisan conservatives, who only want to find explicitly ideological publications, rather than outlets that might have more reach.)

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