MEGAN MCARDLE MAKES A MODEST PROPOSAL: Bring the Right Wing Into the Mainstream Media:

There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote.  As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to. Now the castle residents are peering into the swamp and wondering what the heck is going on out there.

But whoever is to blame for the problem, yelling at the residents of the swamp to behave themselves is probably not going to fix it. What would fix the problem is if the folks in the castle made a concerted effort to open the doors and persuade some of the swamp-dwellers to move inside. Not just to move inside, but to help run the place, pushing back on liberal pieties and dubious claims with the same fervor that liberals push back on conservative ones.

Good luck with that – as Charles Krauthammer wrote 14 years ago, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

And being human, to borrow Megan’s phrase above, there’s vast difference between how we treat the two classifications. If you’re the leftist editor of a newspaper and hire someone whom you ultimately come to believe is stupid, you can always assign him to cover planning boards and sewer zoning meetings, where his writing will do relatively little harm. But why would you hire – why would you trust – someone whom deep down, you believe is evil?