Of course, it also helped our agenda. Not only would the readers get a point of view the mainstream media tried to ensure they had never had before, but when that liberal freaked out it would leave an opening for a Republican governor to fill.
The media then was a powerful weapon for progressives, but it was in decline as printed newspapers faded to cocktail napkin size and the nightly news became the realm of sexually dysfunctional old people pining for FDR. The new media arose, and mainstream journalism had to adapt. It is less objective today—or, rather, it pretends it is objective less—and much more decentralized.
The old mainstream media is a thing of the past. Big, proud institutions like the New York Times and ABC and the like evolved into online content providers, albeit ones with better name recognition at the beginning. We have had to work to keep our audience at the Times—we cannot take it for granted, which is why I am here on Capitol Hill every day, talking to people, touching base with sources, getting real news the only way you can—by real reporting.
Do I miss objectivity? I never knew objectivity. All I ever saw was a liberal echo chamber, and I figured if that was how it was going to be, then I wanted our story to be the one that was echoing. Look, I am a reporter, not a propagandist. If all I ever do is praise the Republicans and trash the Democrats, I’m going to have terrific sources among the GOP and none among the Dems. Both sides know I will give them a fair shake—I won’t give either side a break, but I will make sure their side gets told even if I have to report other facts that show their side is a crock.
I think my views against “objectivity” as a concept—which even today are controversial among journalists—are really a reaction to what I experienced coming up in the Obama and Clinton years. Whenever anyone starts talking about “objectivity,” I immediately flash back to years and years when objectivity was just another way of saying, “Support and reinforce the liberal status quo.” I don’t think objectivity exists. I’ve never seen it truly practiced. I think I can function best by making my views known and dealing with people honestly and fairly.
I think the media today is much better. It’s much more conservative-friendly than it was, but we did not hesitate to reveal the corruption scandals in the last couple Republican administrations. I voted for Carrie Marlowe, but when her secretary of energy got caught selling off assets as she was closing down the Department of Energy, I didn’t hesitate to run it on the front page.
I am a conservative—I don’t cover for government failures. That’s the opposite of what I believe! In fact, I infuriated a j-school panel a few years ago when I told the audience that a liberal political reporter has a built-in conflict of interest because he loves the idea of the government he is supposed to ruthlessly show is failing. I have not been asked back!
We succeeded in changing things, though. As conservatives, we needed to be in the game. We needed to show up. We could no longer cede the critical node of news and information to a coterie of leftists with zero compunction about turning it into a 24/7 propaganda tool for whatever leftist was in power or aspiring to it.
We conservatives needed to become part of the media, and we did. We did it by making ourselves invaluable. To break in, we had to encourage young conservatives to hide their views just enough to get inside the fortress. We were liberal Trojan horses. And once inside, while the liberals were asleep, we crept downstairs to unlock the front gate.
Paul Warner (News Anchor)
“Sometimes I wish I could be Walter Cronkite,” admits Paul Warner, the new anchor for the NewsRight network’s evening news show Right Update. With an average rating of 5.4, it is among the highest rated of all the evening news and political shows, even though it counts as viewers about only 1 in 20 Americans.
Cronkite would have something like one in three TVs in America watching him every night 75 years ago. He had a lot of power, but he had to pretend to be objective although it was pretty clear he was very much a man of the left. Now, I can be open with my biases because I don’t presume to speak as some gatekeeper of acceptable ideas. You can find any ideas that interest you out there! If you come to NewsRight, you’ll get news from a constitutional conservative perspective with no apologies.
I started with NewsRight in 2017. It used to be MSNBC, but they were doing poorly and a bunch of wealthy conservatives bought it. Let’s just say the day they revealed who the buyers were caused some consternation in the headquarters! The rest of the media was apoplectic, almost as much as when conservatives bought the old Los Angeles Times.
We were a direct competitor to the Fox News Channel from the right. Fox had come in as a conservative alternative, but it still tried to be part of the objective paradigm. It really was fair and balanced (that was actually its motto) because it would actually acknowledge conservative ideas and concerns. I loved Fox, and it was critical to keeping conservatism alive during the Obama days and it remains a powerhouse today.
But we were different. We were outright advocates for constitutional conservative values, where most other outfits claimed to be objective. Getting more conservatives into newsrooms and on television and on the web news shows that still embraced the objective model had a huge effect. It was not so much the on-air presentation—that was the last to start changing away from liberal bias—but the choice of stories and the production and editing.
You’d have these very liberal anchors and you could see them biting their lips as they had to read news copy and introduce clips that just totally undercut the liberal narrative. I remember one almost fainting over a story about a welfare cheat who was bragging on air about having five kids from five different fathers to get all sorts of government handouts. You would have never seen that in the past, though it was absolutely true and absolutely a story. But that anchor had no choice but to grit his teeth and read a story that probably converted a few thousand citizens away from liberalism!
Competition was only a part of it. The other key component was conservatives working their way up on the inside. For years, conservatives had stayed out of journalism, but the web and guys like Andrew Breitbart inspired talented conservatives to go out and get jobs in the media as journalists.
It could be hard to get a job, and hard to keep one, if you were a known conservative. I remember one reporter at ABC was found to be conservative and fired. Well, he sued under the new federal Political Discrimination Act that made it illegal to fire someone over their political beliefs if the job was not expressly political. Well, ABC had to argue that being an “objective” reporter was political, and that really hurt their credibility.
Oh, as a conservative I thought the law was inappropriate—it’s none of the government’s business why you choose to hire or not hire someone—but after Obama and Hillary we got a lot less fussy about using liberals’ own tactics against them! It’s our media now.
Chapter Ten: Breaking and Remaking the Law
Conservatives had long defended a criminal justice system that dispensed little justice and was barely even a system. But by the 2010s it was obvious that the system was failing—and as the liberal administrations abused the justice system for their short-term political ends, it became clear that it required conservative attention. By embracing conservative values, the insurgency drew new recruits while leaving the liberals to defend a decaying, discredited institution.