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No, there is a code of conduct. A conservative judge could have an absolutely egregious conflict of interest and fox news, conservative talk radio and boomer facebook would carry water for them.
But nobody cares what the conservative media thinks. That's the essential asymmetry. A conservative judge could be pressured into recusing himself by the NYT/WP/CNN/NPR (directly or indirectly); a leftist judge cannot be pressured by the conservative media.
I think this is pretty transparently untrue, especially if you spend lots of time around retirees. There is a significant population who cares about OANN or Fox or whatever. Some of them are also wealthy, opinionated, and like those college-campus kids in that they have lots of time to spend on politics.
The much-maligned unelected judges are reasonably well insulated from the opinions of these voters. That cuts both ways, though, and I don’t see how conservative media is categorically different from its liberal or centrist counterparts.
It’s also rather hard to prove a negative. Did you have a leftist refusal to recuse in mind?
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Tens of millions of people care what conservative media thinks, and they vote accordingly. A conservative judge couldn't be pressured into recusing themselves by the media.
Too bad the country has hundreds of millions of people, and the ones in Washington DC (even the conservatives, by and large) aren't among those who care what conservative media thinks. Nobody who could put pressure on a Supreme Court justice cares what conservative media thinks. Sotomayor could participate in a case that her daughter was involved in and nobody in DC would blink an eye.
And the NYT have 10 million subscribers out of hundreds of millions of american citizens. Guess conservatives overestimate the impact of the Times as well. I doubt very much that conservatives in DC ignore what Hannity and the rest of them think, given how they stumble over themselves for endorsements. And Clarence Thomas could participate in a case that affects someone who owns his mother's house without any consequence whatsoever.
But they're the right 10 million, and further they influence a lot more than that.
Too bad they couldn't influence the election in 2016, for all their power. Or supreme court shenanigans. Or rampant gerrymandering. Or protect abortion rights. Turns out running the OWG and pulling all the strings in the American government isn't all it's cracked up to be.
That was their screwup. They brought up Trump as a bogeyman and ended up giving him publicity. Just because they screwed up doesn't mean they don't have power. (And of course the Supreme Court and abortion are downstream of that mistake.)
I think this shows "they" are not in fact on the same page. Most media might have a liberal bias, but they also want clicks and views. If Trump gets them those, they are likely to do that even if it works against their liberal views in the long run. Just because groups have interests in common doesn't mean the weights they give to those interests is equal. If I was a Democrat strategist and had control of the media I would be starving Trump of as much oxygen of publicity as possible, not breathlessly reporting on whatever his latest speech/social media post said.
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If the foundation of your worldview is that liberal Jewish elites run the show/elections are just Kayfabe (insert your favorite variant here so we don't end up quibbling over your beliefs) and you work your way out from there, interpreting data as you go, I can guarantee that you'll find a lot of data that supports your worldview. Flat Earthers have long chains of logic where no individual link is completely bonkers, but it's built on a rotten foundation.
From my perspective, Hillary Clinton was a fairly strong candidate who was done dirty by a combination of conservative media (proto-Qanon cheese pizza/adrenochrome/comet ping pong beliefs? Collapsing like a sack of meat showing that she was on death's door?), email server bullshit, bad feelings around the Bernie Sanders saga (were the Kochs involved???) and genuine dissatisfaction amongst working class whites towards the system and elites. With this framing, conservative media isn't so worthless after all.
There's this odd dichotomy in Conservative circles; Trump will rant about how the media hates him and he's the underdog, then turn around and brag about how Fox News is the most watched channel while CNN and the failing New York Times are hemorrhaging viewers because the General Public is on our side and hate being lectured about trannies. Dan Crenshaw is some Alpha Male soldier bro who releases ads of him obliterating the libs, but everyone in DC is a feckless RINO who drops their trousers and bends over anytime the White House comes knocking for more funding. The libs are a bunch of soyboy faggot snowflakes who REEEEEE at our dank memes, but they're also shadowy elites pulling the strings in Davos that we're on a righteous crusade against.
Just because they have power, doesn't mean they're omnipotent or even (apparently) that they get what they want most of the time. Furthermore, blaming shadowy elites for all your problems is usually (1) cope and (2) easier to confront than the fact that tens of millions of your countrypeople genuinely believe what they say they believe and they aren't just being manipulated by the media or George Soros or whatever else you want.
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