Interesting. E.J. Dionne has a column today titled “Rush and Newt are winning,” asserting that a conservative media bias (to use his words, “Yes, you read that correctly”) is actually dragging the political discourse in the country further to the right, thus tilting the playing field in favor of Republicans despite the fact that the GOP is now pretty far out of power.

That may be true. But in the long run, I simply don’t think it matters.

Conservatives began to yammer in earnest about the liberal media bias during the Nixon presidency - Spiro Agnew’s quip about the “nattering nabobs of negativism” was one of the opening salvos in this line of attack. But if a liberal media bias did exist at that point, it’s worth pointing out why.

Democrats held both houses of congress in this country from 1955 to 1979. During that period we had about an even split in terms of the presidency (Ike-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter), but the point is that the government was dominated by the Democratic Party, public discourse by a perceived liberal consensus. And the press, simply, reflected that. If you worked in Washington during that era, you likely dealt with Democratic staffers, members of the liberal policy elite; the coverage reflected the fact that Democrats ran the show, perhaps for many years after the Democrats ceased to run the show, at least entirely.

Fast-forward to now. We have just come through a period of Republican/conservative political dominance. With the exception of the 107th Congress, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress from 1995 to 2005. Bush was in office for eight years; there has been a perceived conservative consensus. So if you worked in Washington during this time, you likely dealt with Republican staffers, members of the conservative policy elite. Conservative pundits mattered to you because they seemed to reflect the political will of the country at large. That’s just the way it works; when you cover power, you cover those who are in power. Who, recently, have tended to be Republican.

So it’s reflected in the media. Dionne is right about that. What he’s wrong about, I think, is whether it will make a difference. The conservative movement, after all, rose to prominence at a time when the media was perceived (by conservatives, at least) to be biased in favor of liberalism. Conservatism prospered despite this alleged bias; in other words, no matter how “biased” the media was, it did not prevent the movement of the country to the right.

Neither, now, will a conservative bias in the media prevent the pendulum from swinging in the opposite direction. This is based on how events - the economy, Iraq - affect people’s lives, rather than what the pundits or the media say about those events. Most people don’t wait for the media to tell them how to interpret something, after all.

So call it a hangover; the media lags in reflecting the changes of the country specifically because it takes time to develop new sources and new narratives. It’s easier to go to the well even after - for the general public - that well has gone dry.