Guh?

According to Noam Scheiber and Peter Beinart, the way to solve the problem of attacks by conservatives on the mainstream media is, well, to hand the mainstream media to conservatives.

Our boss, Peter Beinart, has a theory about how to undercut the conservative punditry’s assault on the mainstream media: coopt it. The basic idea is that most of the conservative animus toward the MSM comes from feeling spurned by it. If that’s true, then the easiest way to fix this would be for establishment media institutions to hire lots of bright young conservatives. (This is already happening to some extent, but probably not nearly enough to change the MSM-bashing calculus on the right.) Conservatives would become invested in the institutions that employ them; they’d embrace the norms of empirical rigor, intellectual honesty, and objectivity (or, as conservative media critics would have it, “empirical rigor,” “intellectual honesty,” and “objectivity”) that govern the profession. Pretty soon the problem might be solved.

Clever. As James Fearon suggests, conflicts can always be solved by unilateral surrender.

Lots of good ideas coming out of that New Republic these days. I wonder, just how out of touch do you have to be to come up with things like this? What, precisely, has to have gone wrong with the way you think in order to make this make sense? I’d like to think that this is a joke, but I don’t really see any reason to believe it is.

Via Crooked Timber.