On Friday, Matt Welch linked to a Columbia Journalism Review article imploring journalists to “Own its Liberalism.” The most interesting part comes at the end:

Although it is the subject for another essay, the fact is that there are very few good conservative reporters. There are many intellectually impressive conservative advocates and opinion leaders, but the ideology does not seem to make for good journalists. In contrast, any examination of the nation’s top reporters over the past half-century would show that, in the main, liberals do make good journalists in the tradition of objective news coverage. The liberal tilt of the mainstream media is, in this view, a strength, but one that in recent years, amid liberal-bias controversies, has been mismanaged. (emphasis added)

Movement conservatives have been complaining about media bias for as long as I can remember, and I have even joined in at times. It only recently occurred to me, however, that the cons never seem to look at liberal bias  as a product of their own failing. Why do so few conservatives become reporters and why are rightwing news outlets second rate, at best? The Washington Times has been around for more than twenty-five years but I rarely hear of it breaking an important story. Pajamas Media and its spawn, PJTV deal almost exclusively in opinion, and they aren’t very good at that. The CJR article appeared because the Times was slow picking up on the ACORN expose of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. But while the Times was ignoring a story of middling importance at best, it was at work on a lengthy and far more important story about food safety:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Although agribusiness is deeply involved with big government, I don’t expect one of Breitbart’s operations to do this sort of investigation because it would be too expensive and there are no obvious ideological benefits to right wingers: Republicans are as much or more in bed with agribusiness as Democrats and discussing food safety tends to lend credence to environmentalists. That is one big reason why, with all of their faults, I hope that the Times and other MSM outlets keep going and I could care less if the pay attention to the investigative product of the rightwing blogosphere.