I must admit that, after the election, the On The Media people were so alarmed on such a regular basis that I had no trouble imagining Brooke Gladstone very calmly and cogently explaining the audience why Trump voters need to be lined up against the wall and shot to advance the Revolution.

I’ve cut down substantially on my NPR consumption since November 2016, and indeed on my news consumption in general. I can blissfully state that I have no idea what is going on in the Russia investigation or who (if anyone) is guilty of what (if anything).

–James H.

Belated reply from another reader – National Review was founded by the original “Conservative,” William F. Buckley, Jr., who coined the term and defined it with respectable intelligence and impeccable educational credentials. Both the Journal and the National Review have become shameless Fox Television shills, they are not the thoughtful, Conservative publications they once were. I’m sure Buckley is rolling in his grave, and more than once I have written to the Editor of NR describing their ghastly deterioration. I just can’t read either anymore.

I missed this comment 9 months ago, but thanks!

As for your question, I’ve really come to dislike the Journal. I had always known, of course, that they tended to lose sight of genuinely conservative economic principles whenever they thought they or their cronies could make a buck. (As far as I can tell, the Journal has supported *every* American military action, actual or merely proposed, going back to at least the Reagan Administration.) But that’s just human nature (the Times does the same thing with its agenda), and I was reading other sources to correct for it. I do think it’s gotten worse since Murdock took over, but that may also just be me becoming more skeptical of tax cuts and wars of liberation as I get older.

It was the Journal’s response to the Trump campaign that broke me. The Journal rightly opposed Trump, but it then decided (late in the primaries) that it hated Cruz so much it would rather have Trump. That is so deep a betrayal of the principles the Journal claims to espouse that I can never take it seriously again.

Problem is, I still can’t think of any right-leaning straight news sources that would serve as good island reading. The Right really struggles to stand up good straight-news sources. There’s money in right-wing news, but it’s also explicitly ideological — and often merely partisan.

Who’d have thought when I wrote this that Breitbart would soon be the most powerful right-wing outlet in the country? Wow. How far we’ve slide down the slope.