Judge not the media, lest ye be judged

Conservatives have never been big fans of the legacy news media. For decades, they have watched supposedly impartial journalists present a slanted, agenda-driven version of reality that ignores conservative concerns and eagerly advances left-wing narratives on nearly every key issue.

But, while anger and contempt are understandable responses to this bias, censorship is not the answer. Yet, this week, the Economist released a YouGov poll revealing that 48 percent of self-identified conservative respondents would allow courts to impose fines on media outlets that publish "biased or inaccurate" stories. Only 16 percent can say with certainty that they oppose criminalization of journalistic bias or imprecision.

It is instructive to ponder how, exactly, the state would decide what was true and what false. Would judges decide for themselves, or would there be a central database of facts that they'd use for reference? Who would put together this database, and where would be it stored? One idea would be for responsibility to rest with a Ministry of Truth, which was what George Orwell suggested in Nineteen Eighty Four, one of his two dystopian masterpieces.

How is it that so many conservatives could warm to the idea of judges punishing newspapers for media bias? Let's hope it has something to do with faulty polling methodology, but we doubt it. This result is not just depressing. For anyone who calls himself or herself a conservative, it's downright embarrassing.

Set aside the fact that blind faith in judges goes against every lesson conservatives should have taken from the last 50 years of political history. More importantly, it makes professed concern for the First Amendment appear self-serving and hypocritical. Today's efforts to undermine the First Amendment are very real. Far too much is at stake for conservatives to abandon its defense.