Movement Conservatives now bank on the idea that any media other than Fox is biased toward an un-American point of view. In 2012, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich summarized the argument. He called out the media for ignoring the Americans who “so deeply want their country to get back on the right track,” and who were tired of “elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system.” But mainstream news channels do not seem to understand the history of the Movement Conservatives’ political attack on impartial media. For Movement Conservatives, any news coverage that does not explicitly endorse their viewpoint is biased and un-American by definition, no matter how well sourced or argued it is.

In their attempt to honor the American tradition of impartial and fair media, mainstream news channels have worked to give more and more airtime to the Movement Conservative worldview, until we have reached a point where the first Republican presidential debate will allow only a minute for responses to how a candidate would deal with the most pressing questions in the world, and where the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for president—for the most powerful office in the world—is the ultimate salesman.