Obama's last lament

Media bias made Rush Limbaugh’s career, giving him more than enough material for three hours a day. Media bias made Fox News, which finds itself in the odd position of being the most popular cable-news network while programming a great deal of material about the defects of the media. Because most of the local newspapers that we grew up reading in the pre-Internet era did not have Washington bureaus or foreign correspondents, even those of us who grew up in very conservative areas were treated to a great deal of increasingly obvious and contemptible bias thanks to the Associated Press and other news services. We learned not to trust them, and, as technology began providing us with a rich menu of alternatives, our distrust grew into something like contempt.

But here is the thing: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News did not convince Americans to distrust the New York Times and Dan Rather. The Times and Rather saw to that themselves — talk radio, Fox News, and right-wing Web journals are the result of that alienation, not the cause of it.

Institutions matter. As President Obama intuited, we lost something when we lost a common understanding that the news is the news, and that while the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal might not necessarily see the world the same way, we ought not dismiss a claim of fact simply because of the flag under which it was published.

The American Left has long understood the importance of institutions, thus its embarkation some decades ago on its “Long March” through them. It has been remarkably successful: It is very difficult to be an open conservative while seeking a position as, say, a professor of liberal arts. A would-be history professor active in pro-life causes faces all manner of retribution and exclusion that a would-be history professor active in pro-choice causes does not. The public-school bureaucracies and the unions affiliated with them are organs of the Democratic party. The IRS has been, under Barack Obama’s watch, converted into an instrument of politics deployed against conservative organizations, as have other federal agencies. Did Barack Obama organize this or consent to it? Maybe, maybe not. But he and his administration saw to it that those who were commandeering these institutions for political purposes were sheltered from the consequences of doing so. Lois Lerner isn’t in prison, but enjoying a comfortable federal pension.