Mother Jones is having a characteristic conniption over a seven-minute video about liberal bias in the media being shown at the Newseum in Washington:

So the message, while shallow, is clear: the media is liberal, and any critique that it may have a corporate or conservative bias is so ridiculous it doesn’t even need to be voiced. (Juan Williams says journalists should be careful not to produce a story so it “fits an idea that may have come from you or from your news editor or your managing editor.” Intriguingly, the U.S. media seems to have no owners or advertisers.

This is nonsense concentrate. What’s interesting, though, is the implicit belief that a “corporate bias” (whatever that may be) is related to, or synonymous with, a “conservative bias.” To begin with, the idea that businesses organized as corporations (as opposed to businesses organized as partnerships, sole proprietorships, or family-held firms) share a particular outlook, toward which the news can be biased, is not very much rooted in reality. In the real world, corporations compete with one another and do not necessarily share interests. Does anybody really think that an insurance corporation has the same biases as an agricultural corporation? Does Wal-Mart have the same biases as Starbucks or Saks Fifth Avenue or Ben & Jerry’s? That is doubtful.

What is even sillier is the tired trope, evergreen on the left, that corporations and their executives are particularly conservative, and that Wall Street in particular is a citadel of conservatism. This simply is not the case, as anybody with even a passing familiarity with that world knows. Wall Street barons are, for the most part, rich Manhattan cosmopolitan who have no time for such conservative fixtures as the religious right, the Second Amendment, or, in many cases, free enterprise. If preferring to pay less tax is the criterion of conservatism, then they are indeed conservative–and so is the entire population of the planet not ideologically committed to paying higher taxes.

But there is more to conservatism than that. Liberty, for instance. Big Business often adores regulation, because it raises the cost of entry into the market and suffocates scrappy but undercapitalized competitors. You think the steel industry, agribusiness, or banks want an economy that is more free, more capitalist, and more competitive than the one we have? You think Boeing wants a smaller, leaner federal government? Their actions suggest otherwise. Big employers are among the top lobbyists for enacting a French-style government-run health-care system in the U.S., because it would allow them to shift a substantial part of their personnel costs onto the government.

The idea that ABCBSNBCNN & Co. have a conservative outlook because they are corporations is laughable. And it’s just as comical to believe that other big media corporations, such as The New York Times Co. or Gannett, are peopled by closet conservatives. The executive suites may not be quite as uniformly left-Democratic as the editorial offices, but they’re not exactly the Provo Chamber of Commerce, either.