And sometimes no one watched. I remember shows where I would have two guys in the chat room and one would be some leftist spewing homophobic crap. Leftists were the biggest homophobes I ever encountered—conservatives might not have liked thinking about my lifestyle, but they were always respectful. The leftists were just vulgar and gross.
Anyway, I learned. I learned how to set up and pace a show, how to handle calls, how to talk. It took me a long time, but by the time I got my first terrestrial radio hosting gig—a guest host job at a New Hampshire station—I had lost my “ums” and “uhhs.” It was great training. When I got the call to come up to the big leagues, I was ready.
And I had a fan base. Conservatives were incredibly gracious and supportive. I guess we had to be, since the entire political establishment and media were against us. I had fans who listened in every day. Then they would promote me on social media through their Facebook and Twitter accounts—you need to understand how important those were to our organizing and communicating within the movement in the teens and twenties.
Yeah, they tried to shut us down. The resurrected Fairness Doctrine rule was just a transparent attempt to shut us up by trying to make sure we were weighted down with unlistenable liberal crap.
They called it “balance.” I was conservative so I had to have “balance” to use the public airwaves. My stations freaked when Hillary’s minions imposed the regulation; they were pretty much planning to switch to easy listening music until I came up with Chet the Fairness Guy.
Chet became my partner on the show. His favorite phrase was, “Duh, work is hard. Give me free money!” I would talk for a long while and then ask Chet the Fairness Guy if he had any insights and he’d usually say, “Duh, work is hard. Give me free money.” This was our balance. It was a joke, and I treated it like that. Then the regulators came down on me and filed a complaint alleging that Chet the Fairness Guy was not “a legitimate representative of alternate political viewpoints.”
Now, Chet was played by this guy name Neal Cornish who had a masters in political philosophy from Cornell and really knew his stuff. So when we sued, Neal goes up on the stand and articulates the liberal viewpoint perfectly to show he can, though he adds he doesn’t believe a word of it because it’s absolute nonsense. So the government then has to argue that the balance guy has to really believe in the alternate viewpoint he’s expressing, and even the liberal judges start getting uncomfortable at the idea that the government can go in and validate the sincerity and efficacy of every radio host in America.
Then I get up on the stand and start talking about what a mess the whole thing is, like if Chet the Fairness Guy and I agree on something, did we have to go out and find someone else who didn’t?
And the government lawyers are getting furious because we are showing how stupid and fascist the whole thing was, and how unenforceable it would be even if the Constitution allowed it. They start arguing that if Chet the Fairness Guy won’t make a good case for liberalism, then the government had a right to provide someone who would. The judges by then are just shaking their heads—except for one really leftist one, they were over it. The new Fairness Doctrine could not pass the straight face test and it got struck down. But every once in a while, Chet the Fairness Guy still comes to visit my show to rail about how much he hates the idea of work.
Colleen Hazlitt (Conservative Journalist)
We are walking through the New York Times reporter’s “office,” which is really no office at all but a corridor in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. She never stops moving long enough to need a desk.
Our footsteps echo down the quiet halls of the aging building as we head toward the elevators. I struggle to keep up—the legendary reporter has to move fast to meet her deadlines. If I was not tagging along today, she’d be dictating her article into her iPhone 42 as she walks and letting the editing program proof and post it while she started her next project.
When I got here, these buildings were packed with people. Packed! Washington was the center of the universe. It was like a black hole, sucking in all the power and money from across the country. First with Obama, then with Clinton II, Washington was a boomtown. This was the place to be if you wanted influence, or if you were like me and wanted to write about people wielding influence.
I was conservative from a very young age. I never fell for liberalism, not in the least. I thought it was ridiculous and corrupt and I still do. But I also loved journalism. I had ever since I was a reporter on my middle school paper in the 2000s. I still do—the thrill of getting beneath the surface and getting the real story and then putting it out there… I love it.
I wanted to be on one of the biggest and best-known papers. I knew they were liberal fever swamps. Columbia Journalism School pretty much required you to swear fealty to the liberal creed. But I wanted to be part of that world, yet I wanted to be true to my beliefs. By the time I got to j-school, I wanted to promote conservatism through my journalism.
I was taught objectivity throughout my journalism education. They pounded it into us. But the fact is that “objectivity” in theory always meant liberalism in practice. Journalism education operated under the premise that we journalists were liberal and reinforced the idea that we were going to spend our careers supporting a liberal status quo. Most of my classmates, and later colleagues, were liberals, and they were happy and comfortable with their positions in the power structure. I wasn’t, nor were the other conservatives I knew.
We wanted to shake things up, not only because conservatism was better policy-wise but because contrarian journalists would improve journalism as an institution. When I started in the second Obama term, and then when I got hired on at the Washington Post and eventually the Times, journalism was generally a low-quality product. Most journalists were trying desperately to cover for those in power while trying to hang onto their jobs in an industry most Americans had abandoned as irrelevant. If you know what the paper is always going to report—liberals good, conservatives bad—most people are going to get tired of it and go elsewhere for information.
So we wanted to save journalism, but to do that we had to change it. Changing journalism required that we conservatives infiltrate the media. Once we did that, we could change it from the inside. That’s how guerrillas do it.
The media was overwhelmingly liberal in large part because the people going into the media were overwhelmingly liberal. Unlike in other fields that attract young, idealistic people—by which I mean unformed, immature people—there was no incentive to grow out of liberalism over time. Say you went into business as a 24-year-old liberal. By the time you are 30, you’re probably thinking Milton Friedman was a squish . Experience and accountability spur maturation.
But if you went into journalism as a 24-year-old liberal, six years later you are a slightly balder, slightly fatter liberal with the mentality of a 24-year-old. There was no accountability, no hard knocks, other than the changes in the industry itself. You would tell yourself that those changes were not your fault—your audience just was not wise enough to appreciate your work. And there was a newsroom full of other liberals reinforcing all the stupid things your college professors taught you.