Cable News ‘Conservatives’ Distort Our Politics and Lead Viewers Astray

When most media consumers see, hear, or read a criticism of conservatives on cable news, it typically is directed at Fox News Channel, although conservatives are allegedly featured on all three of the networks.

Even as Fox News wrestles with a billion dollar lawsuit and the embarrassing evidence of journalistic malpractice unearthed by it, there remains worth in even the network’s most self-indulgent work.

In its best moments, Fox provides a much-needed alternative to CNN, MSNBC, and the networks. In its worst, it at least provides a window into the thoughts, wants, and fears of some non-negligible segment of the right.

But what can be said for the kind of conservative kept in the cupboards at its cable competitors and wheeled out to serve partisan purposes? Only that they pad the pre-existing biases of their left-leaning audience, leaving them with a distorted understanding of American politics.

An example: CNN recently dispatched three reporters to prove that conservatives were deeply concerned by the actions of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a top contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. They came back with critical quotes from two potential rivals for that nomination, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu and Maryland’s Larry Hogan. In other words, two pro-choice, blue state Republicans well to the left of the conservative wing of the party.

They also reached out to the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an equal-opportunity defender of free speech maximalism that has, laudably, defended controversial figures on the left and right. But the report misleadingly described the organization as “right-of-center,” invoking its defense of white nationalist Richard Spencer‘s right to speak at the University of Florida, a public institution subject to First Amendment protections, in a selective and lazy attempt to justify that label.

The article identifies DeSantis stripping Disney of certain benefits long extended to it by the state of Florida, his attempts to regulate the curricula at public universities, and his refusal to allow an Advanced Placement African-American Studies course that included among other ideological topics a unit on “Black Queer Theory,” as proof of his supposedly troubling activist instincts.

In short order, CNN convened a panel comprised of The View‘s Alyssa Farah Griffin, a media-rehabilitated former Donald Trump aide, and Mondaire Jones, formerly a progressive congressman representing New York City, to discuss the story. Without a trace of irony, Griffin, who worked for her father’s conspiracy theory-mongering website prior to serving the man in the red hat, lamented the transformation of the Republican Party into the “Trump MAGA party” that alienates “longtime, lifelong conservatives” like herself.

After Jones described DeSantis as a threat to “gay rights” and “whether you’ll teach Black history,” Griffin concurred, asserting that he’s “doing things that I would think independents would be running away from were he to get the nomination.”

In yet another segment on the issue, Jim Acosta brought on Republican strategist Alice Stewart about the faux-phenomenon, who responded by urging viewers to read Vanity Fair‘s Molly Jong-Fast in an effort to understand the whims of conservative voters. No, really.

No doubt there exists compelling critiques of some of what DeSantis has done in the Sunshine State. Mike Pence, a well-schooled and battle-tested conservative, offered one in a recent interview. Parts of the governor’s Stop WOKE Act, the legislation objected to by FIRE, have been struck down by the judicial branch and many plausibly submit that DeSantis has gone too far — for the wrong reasons — in rolling back benefits Disney has long enjoyed.

On the other hand, much of what DeSantis is doing on educational issues is, from a cultural conservative’s perspective, nothing more nefarious than pushback on decades of progressive activism in the realm.

Moreover, Disney has no legal or moral claim to enjoying special treatment in the state, especially if it intends on acting as a dishonest partisan actor.

Any worthwhile discussion of how the actions of the DeSantis administration jives with traditional conservative principles should acknowledge both cases. Yet CNN’s handpicked conservative elected instead to join in a facile pile-on.

Another example: Last Friday, MSNBC’s All in With Chris Hayes welcomed Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee onto his show alongside Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill to discuss how Nikki Haley and other GOP presidential contenders might handle abortion in the 2024 race. Haley has expressed her desire to reach “consensus” around something akin to Senator Lindsey Graham‘s proposed 15-week ban.

Asked how Republicans might contend with the abortion issue, Steele replied: “They’re not.”

“It has not been thought through, the ramifications of any level of ban on abortion after 50 years of this right being embedded in not just the culture, but the healthcare of our country,” he continued, before scoffing at the idea of a ban at 15 or even 26 weeks.

Polling on abortion is notoriously difficult to count on, but a well-versed conservative panelist might have pointed out that a Harvard-Harris survey conducted in the immediate aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade found that 72 percent of Americans would support restrictions after 15 weeks. A Marist poll from January 2022 found that Americans came to roughly the same conclusion: 71 percent of Americans supported restrictions after the first three months of pregnancy.

Steele would appear to stand well to the left of not just the Republican base, but the average American. Nevertheless, MSNBC leans on him to reassure its audience that reasonable conservatives consider their path righteous and victory certain.

Conservatives have long decried this tactic, yet its the networks’ own left-of-center viewership that are worse for the practice. It’s they who are repeatedly caught flat-footed by Republican victories, or by polling in favor of candidates or policies the network’s “conservatives” have assured them are inconsequential, unpopular, or fringe. It’s the viewers who miss out, not just because they gain no understanding of their opponents, but because they hear their own arguments go untested.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.