As a journalist, you wanted to see yourself as some kind of white knight fighting for truth and justice where, in reality, you were usually just a hack. A teacher often teaches because he can’t do, but at least he teaches. Journalists did not even do that much. They just talked about stuff—and then drank cheap, happy hour Bud Light and told each other how awesome they were.
A whole generation of liberals became reporters because of Woodward and Bernstein and All the President’s Men, a turning point in journalism that gave them the terrible idea that they were not just there to chronicle what was happening but to put their fingers on the scale to ensure the right thing happens. Of course, the right thing was always the left thing.
But there is something honorable and important about journalism in a free country, just not the hackneyed propaganda version of journalism we had been treated to since the 1960s. The media was barely even pretending anymore, which hastened the decline that new technology made a foregone conclusion.
If you are going to get force-fed ideology anyway, why would you ever choose to listen to someone who denies he has one even as he forces it down your throat? The scant audiences for the network newscasts were grim testimony to the failure of the “journalist as hidden advocate” model. It was bad enough watching the endless series of commercials about Cialis and diabetes testers without having the network anchors lie to your face.
It was clear that the new media world would shake out, and if we wanted to be part of it, we conservatives needed to show up. So I did, and so did others. We started showing up. There were more and more conservative journalists every day. While I went the traditional route—and got a solid background in the mechanics of journalism and reporting by doing so—most of them were learning their craft online either working for themselves or for some of the bigger sites. This was a huge talent pool, and one where the journalists themselves had a following.
The question was how long the struggling mainstream media outlets could ignore them? They tried—they would hire liberals off the web, but shunned conservatives until some were just too popular to ignore. Many never did decide to hire conservatives—they would rather go bankrupt than go an inch to the right, but other outlets that wanted to survive started scooping these folks up.
With conservative journalists who had no incentive to cover for the liberal establishment coming in, particularly during the Clinton administration, we started seeing something like investigative journalism again. That was a dying art in the Obama/Clinton years. It should be no surprise why—government was expanding and gathering more power and control over peoples’ everyday lives, and liberal journalists generally supported this. They had no incentive to reveal government’s failures and every incentive to cover them up.
Which they did, shamelessly, causing great damage to the credibility of journalism as a whole. The American people saw journalists as simply another kind of hack, looking them in the eyes and lying to them. Not surprising, no one outside of the newsrooms was mourning when newspaper and after newspaper closed and magazine after magazine got sold off for a buck.
Journalism had to change or die, and the most important people to the cause of changing journalism, beyond the lateral hires from established websites, were the true infiltrators. People like me. In the past, conservatives had seemed to self-select away from the media into more friendly realms like business and other fields that conservatives believed actually produce value for humanity. I disagreed. I always thought that journalism—true journalism that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted—is hugely important in a democratic republic. The hallelujah chorus of leftist journalists was not just an embarrassment to the profession but a danger to democracy.
So, we needed young conservatives to change the paradigm and start looking at journalism, a career they might not have otherwise considered. But we had to be sneaky about it. It was very covert.
I would get a sense about new hires, get to know them a bit, make sure they were sympathetic, and then dramatically reveal my conservatism to them. They were usually relieved to have another weirdo right-winger in the newsroom. They were no longer alone.
I weaseled myself onto the team that went out to college campuses to hire at career fairs. If I determined a candidate was conservative, I would be very clear: “Hide your conservatism! Keep your free market light under a basket! Let them keep thinking you are another brain-dead college grad who actually believes that stuff about America being racist, imperialist, sexist, homophobic and… uh… racist!” The word “racist” was always huge back then.
I would tell them, “Smile when the weary hacks who have infested the newsroom for a couple decades spew their liberal silliness. They’ll be laid off soon anyway. Bide your time.” And as they bided their time, they started subtly changing the dynamic.
For me, it began with some tiny rebellions. This Republican congressman got picked up at a brothel in Washington partying with a bunch of football players from the Washington Redskins. Now, when some Republican half-wit did something stupid, we were sure to mention his party prominently. I put it in the second paragraph—I didn’t think about it. It just seemed to fit there in the flow of the story. But I also added some detail on the last Democrat busted with hookers in the city a couple months before. Two in a couple months—I saw it as a trend and therefore relevant.
Oh boy, was there a reaction. My editor moved the Republican reference to the first sentence, which was fair enough. But he cut out the part about the Democrat’s arrest, telling me it was not important to the story. Frankly, I thought “DC’s Hooker Happy Politicians” would have made for a great investigative series, but I’m pretty sure that would have removed my editor from most of the best guest lists so it was never going to happen.
Oh, and my editor refused to let me call the team the “Redskins”—it was racist, you see—and he added some text about the team name controversy implying that the congressman was insensitive to Native Americans because the people he chose to cavort with in the house of ill repute were members of a team with an offensive name.
So, the next month a Democratic congressman got caught in a Baltimore bus station sodomy sting. I wrote it up and, having learned my lesson, mentioned that he was a Democrat right in the first paragraph. Heck, he thought being a Democrat was important—he had spoken at the last Democratic convention the previous year about how the GOP did not have a monopoly on family values. I put that part in too and submitted it. My editor flipped. “What are you trying to do?” he asked me. “This will kill his career!”
I kept up my personal campaign of clarity and truth. I did tiny things, like letting people know when a scumbag wasn’t a Republican—because if he was a Republican scumbag the media ensured everyone knew he was a Republican. Telling the whole truth became a powerful act of rebellion.
Once we got a foothold and started restoring basic journalistic standards, we would ask hard questions of—get this, because it seemed wacky at the time—politicians of both parties. When you might ask a Republican, “Well, Senator Miser, wouldn’t the programs you propose cutting hurt the people who count on them to survive,” maybe you then ask the Democrat, “So, Senator Handout, why should people who actually work for a living have their tax money taken and given to people who refuse to?”
Of course, this caused a furor in the newsroom. But now we were pushing back. We would say, “Look, this is great because Senator Handout will probably vapor lock and have to be carried off to a mental hospital. That’s news! People want to see what happens when it gets real for politicians.” It was crazy—we had to argue in favor of actual journalism. When our editors would have heartburn, we would look innocent and say, “Well, don’t you want me to ask tough questions?” Then we’d add, “I’m just speaking truth to power.”