Why Joe Scarborough matters

Matt K. Lewis Senior Contributor
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While Matt is on holiday, he has selected a few of his “greatest hits” to re-run until he returns next week. This originally ran at AOL’s Politics Daily on October 11, 2011.

It’s become fashionable for some conservatives to say that former Congressman Joe Scarborough isn’t really “one of us.”

But Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” arguably does more to advance conservative ideas than many of the more-celebrated conservative voices in America today. Primarily this is because — unlike those others — Scarborough isn’t just preaching to the choir.

Despite the fact that conservatives now have their own media outlets, like it or not the mainstream media still matter. And as media bias expert Bernard Goldberg has noted, while most reporters have a liberal worldview, most also attempt to report fair and accurately. For this reason, Scarborough serves a vital function, providing “insiders” with an intellectually honest and reliable conservative perspective that might otherwise go unheard.

“Joe is the conservative that all the talking heads and news producers in America wake up to,” says Erick Erickson of the influential conservative blog RedState. “If Joe has a serious concern about something the Democrats are doing, then the talking heads and news producers are willing to consider that there must be something to it.”

Read the whole thing at Politics Daily

Matt K. Lewis