Theren's not much to explain. Why reporters align more with centrist anti-establishment views rather than pro-establishment conservative views PERSONALLY is fairly obvious - a journalists job is a combination of facts, reason and a penchant for trying to push over the ant-heap.

Spoken from your years of experience in the business, Degs? Well, my decade and a half of actual experience in the media leads me to another conclustion -- a journalist job is to report the facts without bias or judgement of the facts. It is the readers job to do that. If you're in that line of work and you think anything else you are committing acts of professional fraud.

The bias exhibited by the press would be shocking to the press itself, if its individual practitioners were generally aware of it. That AP study I referenced caused huge spasms of emotion in the industry, ranging from commitments to hire more conservatives, to discussions of how to be more aggressive in covering other viewpoints to outright denial of a problem (and yes, when the demographic is hugely skewed in one direction in that way, there's a problem -- a similar problem exists with newsroom diversity. Newsrooms are largely white male compounds -- the difference being that there is an industry-wide discussion of that problem, all the time. The furor over the AP study died out after less than a year).

I love the idea that "centrist" and "anti-establishment" are the same thing in your eyes.

You are using your own distortion of the phrase "most natural reading." While I disagree firmly with the Kelo decision, the most natural reading is the one that conforms with the text of the document, and that's all Scalia and Thomas were saying there. It was not a distortion of the text as, for example, the Butler vision of the "general welfare" clause is.

Sotomayor didn't even bother with the Constitution in Ricci, which is why her ruling was overturned.