The Media's "Liberal Bias" Was Always a Lie. Now It's a Weapon.

Gerard Baker celebrates Bari Weiss at CBS and Jeff Bezos's rightward shift at the Washington Post.

In the Wall Street Journal this week, Gerard Baker celebrated what he called a media “revolution” — the installation of Bari Weiss at CBS News and Jeff Bezos’s rightward reorientation of the Washington Post’s opinion section. These moves, Baker argues, are finally fixing the “biggest problem” with elite news organizations: their overwhelming liberal bias.

There’s just one problem with Baker’s analysis: The outlets he claims suffer from liberal bias have spent years systematically disadvantaging Democrats and sanewashing Republican authoritarianism. And now, emboldened by Trump’s victory and billionaire backing, they’re lurching even further right while conservatives like Baker provide the intellectual cover by pretending this is overdue reform rather than oligarchy in action.

The evidence of their success is everywhere. This week alone, the New York Times editorial board published a piece titled “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win,” urging Democrats to, among other things, abandon trans people. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen openly bragged on social media that “we’re now a conservative opinion page.” This is the culmination of a decades-long campaign to bully mainstream outlets so thoroughly that they’d overcorrect themselves into conservatism.