Notorious free-thinker and urban sophisticate John Derbyshire has recently outed himself as a Metro-Con. For another example of metropolitan (if not conservative) bias in the media take a look at this article from today’s New York Times. It’s a story describing how Wal-Mart “has bent American popular culture towards the tastes of their relatively traditionalist customers.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another is simply to acknowledge that Wal-Mart is not shaping popular culture, but responding to it. The store is merely reacting to the signals it receives from its customer base in red–state America and if that includes, sigh, banning Maxim and stocking didactic vegetable videos and novels about the Rapture, so be it. If they’ve got it wrong, somebody else will emerge to satisfy the market that Wal-Mart is ignoring.