Former RNC Chairman Ronna McDaniel wasn’t fired by MSNBC because she couldn’t be counted on to tell the truth. She was fired because her presence on the network allowed for the possibility a counter-narrative might slip through.

That’s why her former on-air colleagues complained. That’s why they denounced her. They were afraid they wouldn’t have answers to the questions she might pose and responses to retorts she might make regarding the Trump campaign, the 2024 election, and the left/right divide in general.

We’ve seen this before. Several years ago, the publication by the New York Times of an op-ed authored by Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton sparked a newsroom revolt. It only ended after the opinion editor and the paper agreed to go their separate ways.

Some call these examples of the inmates running the asylum. There’s more to it than that, none of which has anything to do with editorial freedom. The demands of the overpaid opinionators who masquerade as journalists are being met because the importance of the narrative has eclipsed the requirement that journalists be responsible.

How do we know? Easy. Every Trump verbal misstep is labeled a lie, while Biden’s are described as miscues, mistakes, or fumbles. One is venal, the other is forgivable, even quaint. The distinctions are apparent, reflecting the bias of the reporters and commentators who are busy promoting the narrative that Trump is a danger to democracy while Biden is its savior.

As shortcuts go, that one’s nonsensical. Moreover, it’s untrue. There’s an argument to be made that Biden and his policies are as extreme and as dangerous to the democratic process as many progressives assert Trump’s to be. Indeed, McDaniel might have made just that argument had she been allowed on air.

The left cannot afford to have their certainties questioned. To them, even a discussion of whether the outcome of the 2020 election was affected by fraud is off-limits. No, we’re all required to agree it was, as so many prominent pundits and progressives began to insist in the hours after the last poll closed, the most honest and open election in U.S. history.

Really? It’s an assertion offered without proof and may also be a lie. We don’t know and never will. Historians will debate it years from now, just like they still argue about the role voter fraud played in helping Jack Kennedy defeat Richard Nixon in 1960.

That’s not the issue, though not really. What really has the left up in arms is the fear they’ll have to debate people branded as an employee of a news organization, just like they are, over issues they would just as soon declare settled. They want subjects like climate change is real, the Republican Party is racist, and tax cuts produce deficits that add to the debt off the table: all undebatable because they are true.

They’re not. In my judgment, one is debatable and nuanced, the others are lies, with one being a damn lie. They don’t want to report the story, giving equal time to both sides. Indeed, no less an authority than the New York Times told us all a few years ago through its media writer that some stories didn’t have two sides, and it was about time we accepted this. They want to repeat a narrative, over and over, until the majority of news consumers accept what they have to say as accurate and unchallengeable.

There’s only one way to stop this. Newsrooms and legacy media operations are largely self-selecting institutions. The people who work there hire more people to work there while promoting from within to cover the whole operation with an ideological security blanket that keeps coverage headed in a leftward direction.

That’s as true of writers, producers, editors, and news executives as it is of the on-air talent and folks who write under a byline. Objectivity is out the window because, whether out of sympathy or fear, the chains and conglomerates that own most of these media properties don’t want to take on the challenge of cleaning out the stables.

To bring balance to the force, to borrow a phrase, it’s up to the deep-pocketed billionaires whose interests and reputations are being questioned, even destroyed by these media properties on a daily basis, to step up and buy a few of them.

It can be done, even if there’s a small price to pay. No one complained after George Soros recently acquired a fleet of radio stations as they were coming out of bankruptcy that he could build into a national network promoting his leftist ideas. Yet when David Smith, the executive chairman of the editorially right-leaning Sinclair chain, recently took ownership of the Baltimore Sun, some in the media said it would be better for it to close than for him to be allowed to change its editorial perspective.

Among the many quotable observations that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made during her lifetime is the proviso: “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” Without a place to make those arguments, it can be inferred that the vote can never be won.

Much of America still looks to the legacy media for news gathering and reporting. It may end up on the app formerly known as Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram, but it starts on CNN, CBS, ABC, FOX, NBC, and other networks. Elon Musk showed what could happen if a determined person is dedicated, for lack of better words, to fairness and integrity in sharing information and takes decisive action. Change is possible, even if it is expensive.

What happened to Ronna McDaniel makes it clear that most news organizations don’t hold themselves accountable for their anti-conservative bias. The time is now for the deep-pocketed members of the liberty movement to buy newspapers, television stations, and maybe even a news network to hold other outlets accountable for their reporting. It’s the only way.