GLENN: I love this. This is from Red State. This is from Jay HEP Caruso: There doesn't have to be a struggle for conservative media in the age of Trump.
When I joined Red State in September of 2015, I wasn't directed to write favorably or unfavorably about any of the G.O.P. candidates for president. I wasn't asked, who do you support?
Over time, I became increasingly hostile to the idea of a Trump candidacy. In December '15, I wrote, I wouldn't support him as president.
That decision was mine. While the bulk of writers at Red State held the same position, we're not monolith. That attitude of independence continued through the nominating process, into the general election campaign and still exists today. The Hill has a piece, wherein they spoke to several conservative media outlets, not Red State, regarding the supposed difficulty there is in adjusting to Donald Trump.
One of the issues I have with the piece is the conflation of sites like Gateway Pundit and Breitbart with the Washington Free Beacon, the former two are not conservative media outlets, as much as they are mouthpieces for Trump.
The editor-in-chief of Free Beacon made an excellent point when he said conservative media has always been held to a higher standard than the liberal media. And as conservatives, we have to live up to that higher standard.
When we don't, it not only undermines our work as journalists, but also the conservative project as a whole. He's right.
Outlets such as Gateway Pundit and Breitbart do a disservice to the conservative media outlets because they behave more like palace guards than journalists.
A lot of so-called -- according to John Ziegler -- a lot of so-called conservative media is acting like a dog that caught the car. Now they don't know what the hell to do. They're completely confused because they've never been in this situation before. Well, they shouldn't be confused, he writes. If they're confused, it's because they value access and traffic more than they should value, above all else, the truth.
It's not a challenging endeavor for any journalist, whether they're a reporter or an opinion writer. However, people struggle with it anyway. And that, above all else, does a disservice to the conservative media, in the same way that it does to the mainstream media.
How can conservatives and media point fingers if they're prone to engaging in exactly the same behavior they decry?
There's a tendency, based on the loathing of the mainstream media and Democrats for conservative outlets, to enter into a knee-jerk defense of Donald Trump.
There's a difference between hypocrisy and dishonesty. The media attempt to turn the dismissal by Trump of 46 Obama-era US attorneys into a scandal was an exercise in hackery. It was a moment of ordinary becoming extraordinary. The scandal died a quick death with good reason because it was nonsense. But that differs from hypocrisy. There is no confusion. Favor the truth over access and traffic.
Amen.