RedState: More News, Fewer Pleasing Lies

Here's something interesting in a blogpost this morning by RedState's Erick Erickson. In the course of a fulmination against Mitt Romney and the conservative elites who are reluctantly making peace with him, Erickson writes:

Herman Cain won’t be the nominee because he can’t win women either. Regardless of what you think of the Politico story, Cain’s handling of the story has been an epic disaster. He’s down at least 10 points with women in Iowa. He’s falling even further and doesn’t even realize it. He’s largely been emboldened by a conservative media that is so used to standing by its men that too few are telling Herman that he is now at the point where he must actually sit and answer questions whether he wants to or not and whether he feels maligned or not and whether I think he should have to or not. If he loses women by as big as he is starting to lose the women, he cannot win.

Exactly so. But Erickson should consider the full implicit force of this comment. It's not just Herman Cain that has been emboldened by an unreliable conservative media culture.

Over the past 20 years, conservatives have very successfully built a whole alternative knowledge system, designed to exclude unwelcome information and to reinforce gratifying prejudices.  But alas, the denial of unwelcome reality does not cause that reality to go away. Reality still intrudes and with intensifying inconvenience. In the case of Herman Cain, the consequence of the intrusion are mostly farcical. In the case of the systematic misreporting to conservatives of American economic realities, the consequences are tragic.