A call for more conservative minds in media
When journalists suffered a round of job losses earlier this year, many conservatives felt a strong sense of schadenfreude—and took pleasure in the misfortunes that befell newsrooms controlled by liberals. A few even cheered the layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, the buyouts at the Washington Post, the shuttering of The Messenger, and other workplace woes. “The destruction of corporate media is an end in itself,” wrote Michael Malice, a right-of-center pundit and podcaster with nearly 700,000 followers on X, the social media platform once called “Twitter.”
Dancing on the graves of political foes may hold its satisfactions, but it’s not a strategy for conservatives who hope to break the liberal dominance of the press. Conservatives may even come to miss the old-fashioned legacy media, as Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast has pointed out: “If there are no straight news outlets doing on-the-ground reporting, what will anyone have to blog or podcast about?”
What comes next is anyone’s guess. The news media could keep shrinking, at a time when lots of Americans seem to think that journalism should be free or at least don’t want to pay for it. Perhaps the news media will stabilize and recover, with the help of creative business models. Anybody who has studied the history of journalism knows that it is a tale of technological innovation and disruption, driven by rotary presses and telegraph wires as well as radio, television, and the web. It always changes and never dies.
For conservatives, however, liberal bias will remain a challenge unless they confront a problem that only they can solve: Few of them choose to pursue professional careers in journalism.
This is the single most important factor behind the hegemonic liberalism of the press. It’s not that newsroom leftists have discriminated against conservatives and locked them out of jobs, though in fact this has contributed to the problem. It’s that young conservatives don’t go out for these jobs in the first place. They fail to see journalism as a potential vocation.
Attempts at solutions go back decades. I’m a direct beneficiary. As a college student at the University of Michigan in the late 1980s, I joined the Michigan Review, a newspaper that reported and editorialized about campus events from a conservative and libertarian perspective. We received financial support from a national group, backed by philanthropic dollars, that sought to encourage our careers in journalism. For me, a fellowship opportunity was the clincher: I took a job after graduation at a political magazine in Washington, D.C. It shaped the course of my life.
Today, I’ve been on the masthead of National Review for more than 25 years, though I’ve also turned much of my attention to that original problem of conservative scarcity. As director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and as founder of The College Fix, I oversee efforts to recruit, train, and promote young writers and editors who can introduce viewpoint diversity into the media.
Journalism was an easy choice for me. Reporters ask questions, so the job allows me to indulge my curiosity about politics, economics, and culture. Then I get to pass on what I’ve learned. I’ve told stories in articles and books about events inside the military bunker in the heart of Cheyenne Mountain, how baseline budgeting would help Congress control spending, and why Teddy Roosevelt loved football. Sometimes I wonder why anybody would want to do anything else.
There are of course plenty of other callings, plus reasons to avoid journalism. When you make a mistake in the media, you fail in public. You can face howling mobs of critics even for excellent work. Putting up with it requires a thick skin. Moreover, writing well is hard. Unless you enjoy words in the way accountants must enjoy numbers, then it probably isn’t for you. And while there are many routes to a good living in the news media, the field has a reputation for low pay and instability that goes back to 18th-century London’s Grub Street. As the industry grapples with declining ad revenues and the rise of artificial intelligence, its latest buzz-phrase, repeated by elite writers at the Atlantic and the New Yorker, is an “extinction-level event.” Who besides one of those fabled suicidal lemmings would want to take a job that’s about to fall off a cliff?
On top of that, conservatives simply may be more attracted to different careers, such as business, the military, and religious employment. Survey data suggest that large majorities of bond traders, police officers, insurance brokers, electrical contractors, and radiologists are Republican. Democrats rule social work, teaching, software development—and, of course, journalism. The explanations for these differences probably are embedded in parental attitudes, family work histories, regional origins, education, and even individual personalities.
For journalists, much of it may come down to temperament. If the job of a reporter is to ask probing questions, then there is something adversarial about it. Small-c conservatives, by definition, tend to be at home with the way things are. They are traditionalists who are grateful for their current blessings and skeptical of big risks and radical change—and therefore less determined to question the status quo or clamor for the way things ought to be.
Compounding the problem may be the fact that journalism has become confused with political activism, especially in the aftermath of “All the President’s Men,” a book-turned-movie that advanced the idea in the 1970s and beyond that the best reporters are righteous do-gooders whose heroic purpose is to speak truth to power. As progressives flocked to the profession and turned it into a cause, the abuses of objectivity and fair-mindedness grew worse. In a recent essay for the Economist, James Bennett summed up the trouble with today’s New York Times: “The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.” Bennett became an expert on this topic because he served as editorial-page editor of the Times until he published an op-ed about urban unrest and military mobilization by Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas. In the furor that followed, many of Bennett’s colleagues claimed that Cotton’s views were not merely disagreeable, but that they were positively dangerous and required suppression. Bennett, who is not a conservative, wound up resigning. In this atmosphere of intolerance, conservatives understand that they need not apply. Those who feel the impulse of idealism can work at think tanks, in public-interest law firms, or for Republican officials.
Then there’s the phenomenon of Donald Trump. While Republicans have trusted the media less than Democrats, the divide has widened in the age of Trump. The media’s hysterical coverage of the 45th president explains some of this. Trump’s rhetoric also has had an effect, for example by popularizing the term “fake news.” There is a darker aspect, too. At his rallies, Trump has urged crowds to direct their anger at journalists in the press pits. Opinions may diverge on whether these incidents are moments of comic relief, the equivalent of an Orwellian “Two Minutes Hate,” or something in between. One of their effects is to send a clear message to young conservatives who admire Trump: Journalism is an unworthy profession.
The paradox is that conservative job prospects in the media never have been better, especially for young people. The internet has smashed liberalism’s grip on news and information. It has done so in part by empowering competitors in the form of companies and projects that didn’t exist a generation ago, such as Blaze Media, Breitbart News, Center Square, the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, the Daily Signal, The Dispatch, the Epoch Times, The Federalist, Just the News, Newsmax, the Tucker Carlson Network, the Washington Free Beacon, and the Washington Examiner. These sites vary in political orientation and journalistic quality, but they share one thing in common: They’re eager to find and employ a new generation of conservative reporters, editors, producers, podcasters, talk-show hosts, videographers, and more.
Yet they can’t hire people who don’t exist.
John J. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, national correspondent for National Review, and founder and executive director of The College Fix. His books include “Reading Around: Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas” and “The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.”
