How does the media manage its echo chamber? Much of the management is invisible. If it outcomes were occurring with a racial group, the disproportionate impact would be apparent, but the erasure of conservatives from the media, much like academia, has been an invisible process with a visible outcome whose visibility consists of seeing what isn’t there.

But sometimes the media’s ideological policing of the profession is grossly obvious.

Take Catherine Herridge, a FOX News national security correspondent who jumped to CBS News, and landed some Obamagate scoops. Herridge is a serious and dedicated reporter. CBS News would never have hired her if she just spouted opinions.

But first Biden’s people attacked her, and then deciding that was a bad look, outsourced it to the media, triggering the usual sort of hit piece, in this case, “The New CBS Reporter Driving Democrats—and Some of Her Own Colleagues—Crazy” at the Daily Beast.

Hit pieces like these are a unique staple of the contemporary landscape. They put together anonymous backbiting material from a dissenting figure’s colleagues as part of a pressure campaign to get them fired. They’ve most often been deployed against Democrats who dissent in some way, Bari Weiss at the New York Times has been a repeat target.

Maxwell Tani is exactly the sort of lefty media creature who gets picked to shovel out one of these hit pieces. Herridge has been working for decades as a reporter. Tani was a Huffington Post intern a few years ago. His usefulness is limited to imposing political correctness on the media in its internal Maoist culture war against even the smallest ideological deviations. 

But that’s how the echo chamber gets hermetically sealed.

The media spends a lot of time yammering on about how great a threat Trump’s criticisms of reporters pose to the free press. Meanwhile the corporate “free” press is doing its best to threaten, silence, and intimidate dissenting reporters.