The old political rules are now defunct. And, for this reason, it is an appropriate time to (re)examine the role center-right journalism should play, going forward. It is especially important for those who are engaged in conservative media to be introspective. As luck would have it, I’ve stumbled on a few recent essays that may help shed some light on this.
The first step is to embrace introspection and humility. Everyone is susceptible to a certain amount of unconscious bias. As First Things contributor Peter Wehner noted, George Orwell warned his own readers about his unintentional “partisanship.” “What Orwell was doing, then,” Wehner observed, “was writing from his one corner of events, with as much integrity as he could; but he knew there were things he could not see, perspectives he could not share, areas of understanding that were open to others but not to him.”
Good people can disagree over the proper function of center-right media. A recent essay by someone named Matt Corbett at Ricochet, titled “Two Kinds of Principled Punditry,” pointed out that the two sides in the current NeverTrump vs. Trump media debate “have different assumptions about the nature of commentating, which has made the dispute a multidimensional one that few have acknowledged as such.”
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