According to their worldview, the role of government is to fix things, to be the engine of progress. And, the more important government is, the more important the people who cover government become. This is an ideology married to self-interest. But it's more than that. It goes to the very understanding of how History with a capital H moves.
Progress involves government solving things.
Government provides the verbs for journalistic sentences. Those verbs can only convey either forward motion or backward motion. When government passes laws, it is moving forward. To admit that this formulation is inherently liberal would be to topple a vast array of interconnected assumptions as dear to many earnest and honest journalists as Aristotelian physics was to various Church bureaucrats. This is the point that Harris misses.