Greg Sargent of the Washington Post attempts to explain why some in conservative media have called out Donald Trump for January 6 and “stop the steal” — he cites Bret Baier of Fox News and the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post — and others have not. His answer shows that he either doesn’t understand the media landscape on the right or can’t describe it honestly:

This schism partly reflects differing relations to D.C.’s power centers. Figures such as Baier, and perhaps the Journal editorial board, are part of the Washington press corps, care what its members think, and respect its professional conventions and institutions, such as the White House Correspondents’ Association. “There are clearly some folks who see lasting value to being part of the D.C. establishment media,” Olivier Knox, who writes The Post’s Daily 202 newsletter and previously saw all this up close as former head of the WHCA, told me. By contrast, Fox’s more bombastic right-wing personalities affect a much more antagonistic, bomb-throwing posture toward the D.C. journalistic establishment (though this is often largely performative). As Knox put it, their public posture is for “burning it all down.”

The problem with this framing is that it assumes that Baier et al. are the ones bending their stories to stay cozy with the Washington press corps (which Sargent assumes to be the repository of Truth) while the dead-enders are reacting against the Beltway press. This misreads both the incentives and the thought process at play. The most obvious reason why people such as Bret Baier are saying that Donald Trump did bad things is because it is true, and Baier and others like him prefer to say things that can be backed up with the facts. It is perhaps telling of Sargent’s own mindset that he does not even consider that to be a possible motivation for writing or saying something.

But even aside from that, “what will the DC press corps think?” is way, way down the list of what drives anybody in conservative media. All but the most hardcore “burn down the MSM” people are typically quite happy to share stories from legacy corporate media outlets when they advance a point being argued. It’s not as if there will be a shortage of other media failures to disagree with later. And conversely, most of us are perfectly aware that getting Strange New Respect from liberals and progressives in the Beltway press corps on one story is no guarantee of keeping it tomorrow. The actual incentives in conservative media have much more to do with the audience and various other relationships with people and institutions on the right, as well as positioning in intra-party and intra-ideological debates, than with the White House Correspondents’ Association.