Most right-leaning media outlets, whether on the radio, newsstands, or the Internet, got their start in a media landscape dominated by the center left. Everyone from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh to Roger Ailes to Andrew Breitbart to Tucker Carlson has self-consciously set out to counterbalance the mainstream media by supplying facts, arguments, and insights absent from its outlets. The impulse was once understandable. When Buckley launched National Review, it made little sense for him to spend scarce time and resources duplicating content that could be found in the pages of The New York Times or on the nightly news.

But it's an impulse that is more and more counterproductive every year, because it no longer makes sense to imagine an audience that is captive to liberalism in the newspaper and on the nightly news -- and that needs its weekly copy of National Review just to give it the rest of the story.

Some people still just read The New York Times in the morning and watch the CBS Evening News after dinner. But other media consumers listen to a bit of sports radio in the morning, tune into Rush Limbaugh for 45 minutes at lunch, check in on The Drudge Report at work, watch Fox News on the treadmill at the gym, and scroll through The Corner at National Review Online before bed. Or to read the New York Post in the morning, scroll through Power Line Blog during the day, and comment at Ricochet at night. That's certainly the kind of information consumer that conservative media is often reaching. They would better inform the audience if more of their sites were ambitiously trying to convey the state of the world, nuances and all, rather than gauging what "the mainstream media" is covering so that its own content can be crafted to counterbalance it. Instead they're producing content derivative of outlets that lots of people ignore.

Do conservatives recall their critique of the liberal media? How can the audience stay informed if all their information has an ideological filter? Of course they develop prejudices about the world that bear less and less resemblance to reality! Alas, the right built a mirror image version of the mainstream media as they perceived it. The indefensibility of that approach is apparent from the Fox News slogan, "Fair and Balanced," for that's the stated ideal. They'd never tag the network, "Biased for counterbalance," even though that's closer to the truth. That would imply a need to seek outside information. This warped emphasis is probably exacerbated by the fact that everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Jonah Goldberg to Bill O'Reilly is an information junkie who spends all day consuming content from the dread MSM, if only to mock its worst fare.

The right-leaning media's tendency to define itself against the MSM of its imagination skews its content in all sorts of ways. Understanding that doesn't make the constant racial demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh any more palatable. But it puts the mix of coverage seen at National Review or The Daily Caller in a better light. Some of the writers there have a more sophisticated understanding of race in America than you'd think from the mix of facts and analysis they choose to publish. It's just that they're filtering everything through a highly distorting mental process, whereby what they find relevant and worthy of emphasis is shaped by the strangest things. It isn't an exaggeration to say that conservative media professionals are the people in America who pay the most attention to what Al Sharpton, Janeane Garofalo, and the New Black Panthers say.