Headlines from the New York Times over the past few days:

“Trump: Making America White Again.”

“Trump Turns Staid Process into Spectacle as Aspirants Parade to His Door.”

“Donald Trump’s Swamp Gets Murkier.”

“A Bleak Outlook for Trump’s Promises to Coal Miners.”

Want to guess which are op-ed titles and which are (supposedly) straight-up news stories? Good luck.

The Times, whose grip on reality is always shaky when it comes to the GOP, is institutionally beside itself. As of January, the Great Unwashed will control the presidency, the House of Representatives by their largest majority since the 1930s, more than three out of five governorships nationwide, and control of both houses of the legislatures in 26 states. This is enough to make the Times editorial board reach continuously for smelling salts or something stronger. But all one really needs to say to send the editors and reporters of “the paper of record” into near-apoplexy is one word: “Trump.”

I found that nothing so arouses the ire of a reporter than to question his fairness. Such questioning opens a wide door for dialog.

This is not just about Mr. Trump’s crude comments about women, his tacit and repulsive attacks on minorities, or his decades-long history of questionable financial dealings. For the Times and its fellows in print and electronic journalism, it has to do with their indignation over the idea that someone whose worldview deviates so far from their own could have captured an electorate of which, at long last, it is clear the media understands very little.

The so-called “mainstream media” are stunned, angry and humiliated after the events of November 8. Embarrassed by their collective political tone-deafness, nonplussed by the public’s widespread contempt for them, and insistent upon their endearingly dogmatic belief in their own fairness, many in the Fourth Estate are awakening daily to the recurrent nightmare of their own relative irrelevance to the national debate.

Yet the basic reason for the Center-Left (at best) way they report and the decisions they make about what to report is one of the most serious and underreported stories in American journalism: The consensus worldview that separates most of the “elite” media from about half the country they profess to serve.

Separate Worldviews

Conservatives believe there is a God Who has revealed Himself in clear and unequivocal ways, through the conscience, common sense, and the created world, if nothing else. Liberals usually don’t. Theirs is a moral universe bereft of certainty; things are not wrong but “inappropriate,” and right is simply the wedding of consensus and preference. The self-evident and permanent truths heralded by the Founders are neither truths or obvious.

To the Left, a world of moral absolutes, duty to God, and a limited role for the government is one they find disturbing and unpalatable, constricting and cruel.

Conservatives believe that the text of the Constitution is sufficiently clear to make its umpire role in American law consistent and linear. Original intent can be known and the meaning of the text understood with confidence.

Liberals don’t. They believe the text can be elasticized to find “rights” within it that no one drafting or amending it ever imagined. Why? Because without this belief, they are doomed to see their essential enterprise — the ever-expanding federal state as the highest good in the land — fail. In one of her charmingly unselfconscious outbursts of candor, Nancy Pelosi admitted a few months ago that as to same-sex marriage, “Legislatively, we couldn’t really succeed, but from the courts and the rest … that victory has been won.” Who needs representative self-governance when you’ve got the Supremes, right?

The Liberal Lexicon

And so on. In the liberal lexicon, one employed by the mainstream media as a matter of course:

• “Compassion” means coercive charity, statist redistribution, and intergenerational reliance on government. 
• “Public-private partnerships” mean that the private sector will provide the money and do the work while government tells it what to do and how to do it. 
• “Fairness” means that social transformation, especially that related to radical sexual autonomy, is forced upon a culture whose Judeo-Christian moral foundations are not yet wholly eroded. 
• “Tolerance” means that you must accept what the Anointed declare is socially and morally acceptable or else shut up about it. 
• Institutional separation of church and state means that faith has no place in political action and that secularism’s iron fist must always be ready to strike down any occurrence of religious expression in the public square.

These things are articles of faith, subtle, unspoken, potent, and unbending. By and large, the faith of CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS.

What to do? Conservatives need to begin filling the anchor seats and field reporting positions not just of Fox News and talk radio but of the mainstream media itself. They need to communicate with those currently in such positions why they believe what they believe, presenting to them the alternative and hope-filled conservative vision of American public life. They need to question the fairness of given reports; as a former Capitol Hill press secretary, I found that nothing so arouses the ire of a reporter than to question his fairness. Such questioning opens a wide door for dialog.

In the meantime, keep reading the New York Times. A paper without any comics is becoming awfully funny.