Why do media not confront bad-faith conservatives?

In late May, The Stanford Daily reported a curious story concerning Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian who is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The story itself, although ugly, isn’t that important. But it offers a window into a reality few people, certainly in the news media, are willing to acknowledge: the bad faith that pervades conservative discourse.

And, yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum.

But how can I say that the media refuse to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points, readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.

It seems to me, however, that the media make Donald Trump’s lies seem more exceptional — and more of a break with previous practice — than they really are.

At a fundamental level, after all, how different is Trump from Fox News, which has spent decades misinforming viewers while denouncing the liberal bias of mainstream media?

And the same kind of bad faith can be seen in other arenas — very much including college campuses. Which brings me back to the Stanford story.

Ferguson is, as it happens, one of those conservative intellectuals who hyperventilate about the supposed threat campus activists pose to free speech — indeed, calling the campus left the “biggest threat” to free speech in Trump’s America. At Stanford, he was one of the faculty leaders of a program called Cardinal Conversations, which was supposed to invite speakers who would “air contested issues.”

Among the invited speakers was Charles Murray, famous for a much-debunked book claiming that black-white differences in IQ are genetic in nature. Not surprisingly, the invitation provoked student protests. This was the context in which Ferguson engaged in a series of email communications with right-wing student activists in which he urged them to “unite against the S.J.W.s” (social justice warriors), “grinding them down.”

Ferguson decried the fact that these days few academic historians are registered Republicans, which he takes as ipso facto evidence of biased hiring and a hostile environment.

So what’s really going on here? It’s true that self-proclaimed conservatives are pretty scarce among U.S. historians. But then, so are self-proclaimed conservatives in the “hard,” physical and biological sciences.

Why are there so few conservative scientists? It might be because academics, as a career, appeals more to liberals than to conservatives.

But more to the point, conservative claims to be defending free speech and open discussion aren’t sincere. Conservatives don’t want ideas evaluated on merit, regardless of politics; they want ideas convenient to their side to get (at least) equal time regardless of their intellectual quality.

These days, both universities and news organizations are under constant pressure not just to be nicer to Trump but to respect right-wing views across the board. The people making these demands claim to want fairness.

So you need to remember that this claim is made in bad faith. It has nothing to do with fairness; it’s all about power.