Oh how conservatives loved to hate the media. The leftward tilt of the big prestige press was irritating for those of us on the other side, and compounding the offense were ritualistic denials from the likes of CBS and The New York Times.

Does it strike you as outrageous to suggest, as Fox host Tucker Carlson has, that President Joe Biden’s slow response to the toxic spill in East Palestine is evidence that he doesn’t care about white people? Carlson put it this way: “East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative. That shouldn’t be relevant, but it very much is.”

If you’re disgusted by that, you may understand how some conservatives felt in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina became the occasion for charging George W. Bush with racism. Jesse Jackson told CNN, “I saw 5,000 African Americans on the I-10 causeway. It looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship.” During NBC’s telethon for hurricane relief, Kanye West famously declared that “George W. Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” Those sentiments got a good airing on major TV outlets.

George W. Bush was smeared as a racist despite his “No Child Left Behind” education bill, his appointment of the first Black Secretary of State, the first Black, female Secretary of State, and the PEPFAR program that has saved 25 million lives in Africa — so far.

Many of us were dismayed that Mitt Romney’s anodyne comment about having “binders full of women” was transformed by many into some kind of misogynist slur. And even “Saturday Night Live” mocked press sycophancy toward Barack Obama.

Like most conservatives, I initially welcomed Fox News to the airwaves.

A media world that included Jennifer Griffin at the Pentagon, Neil Cavuto on Wall Street, and Charles Krauthammer every evening on “Special Report” was an overdue counterbalance. An enormous audience had been underserved, and Fox was able to exploit an opening.

But then things went sideways. While we can’t say the Fox News effect was entirely responsible — talk radio, too, played a role, as did social media — it started to become evident during the Obama years that the right’s impatience with press bias had curdled into something more ominous.

The revelations in the Dominion Voting Systems legal filings demonstrate the full corruption of Fox News. The channel that debuted with the tagline “fair and balanced” has become completely untethered to any standard of integrity. Fox is not a news channel; it is the right’s Pravda.

Those at Fox who clung to their integrity, most notably Chris Stirewalt and Bill Sammon, were cashiered. Those who could “protect the brand” by lying were rewarded. That’s anything but “fair and balanced.”