Hack gap

A hack gap is a postulated difference between two political parties in the number of political pundits who aim for partisan victory (see Political hack) rather than to make substantive policy distinctions. The alleged hack gap is thought to give an advantage to the side with more hacks.
In 2011, Adam Serwer wrote: More to the point, though, is that President Obama faces what you might call a "hack deficit." There simply aren’t many legal scholars on the left who are willing to give Obama a pass. Unlike right-wing legal writers, left-leaning ones are treating Obama and Bush equally...Unlike with Bush, Obama doesn’t have a large stable of liberal legal scholars and commenters who are willing to pretend they don’t speak English in order to defend his policies. As a result, the mainstream media’s standards of objectivity, so easily manipulated by Bush’s defenders, reflect the deep skepticism the administration’s arguments have inspired on both sides. The press, while largely silent about Bush's redefinition of "torture," is clobbering Obama’s redefinition of "hostilties."
Jonathan Chait writes: I think this phenomenon is best understood within a larger context. Conservatives have developed an ideological critique of a wide swath of elite institutions that serve a mediating role -- media, academia, even science. In the right wing view, all these institutions are bastions of liberalism hiding behind a facade of disinterestedness. Conservatives have developed their own alternative networks, whose members operate under a far more partisan and ideological ethos, on the view that they're merely offsetting the liberalism of their counterparts. Thus the political culture is tugged right by the asymmetry of liberal elites trying to act objectively and conservative counter-elites making no such attempt.

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