Yes, conservatives often don’t appreciate that “fair and balanced” is not a solution to liberal media bias; it is still a catch phrase for a liberal world view. An honest search for truth will be and often is necessarily political; honesty means putting one’s colours in full view so that people can judge you accordingly; intellectual integrity is not about hiding what you are. “Fair and balanced” means deferring to an elite who get to decide what views are respectably right and which left, so that they may be “balanced”, excluding all that is too extreme. Not only do many questions not deserve “equal opportunity” for those who take the invidious side, but these elites must be chosen through a process of mutual accreditation that only insures a certain group think.

What we need is more intellectual integrity in the media; calling for balance only encourages a kind of liberal relativism that makes it impossible for the journalist to become a serious thinker with a centre of his own.

Disinterestedness is an important thing in a free society and it has its places (e.g. the law, and certain academic functions, ideally) but I don’t think we need a media that pretends to disinterestedness. They are not an expert class capable of passing judgment on those specific questions that call for disinterestedness.