Scaffolding Your Way to the Truth

Looking at this post and its update, it's remarkable how smoothly Glenn Reynolds transitions from treating media bias as the conclusion of an argument to just treating media bias as an axiom once his argument gets debunked. People who think that the media has some sort of significant partisan bias seem to think that arguments are just a kind of scaffolding, and it doesn't really matter if the argument falls apart as long as you've already put in place the conclusion you want.