Like many journalists, Corey Walker didn’t major in journalism; he focused on history and economics while attending the University of Michigan. He loved to write, though, and took one journalism class and penned a few stories for the Michigan Review, a conservative alternative campus publication. He got more journalism experience and training through Campus Reform and The College Fix, organizations that help students prepare for careers in conservative media.
Walker graduated in 2021 and is now a reporter at the Daily Caller, a conservative digital publication co-founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Although he considers himself a conservative, Walker says he has always kept his political leaning out of his stories, a practice he says was reinforced during all of his journalism training and at the Caller. Besides, he said, so many issues pushed by liberals are so wacky, they don’t need an editorial comment for news consumers to see how outlandish they are.
Walker’s news source of choice is Fox News, but he says he also gets news from non-conservative media, offering as examples “The Reid Report,” Twitter and “The View.” Although less conservative than many of his colleagues at the Caller, Walker said he’s shifted farther right since being there.
“Because I’m at the Daily Caller and I report on these things, I’ve become much more — I don’t want to say radicalized — but more hardline on things like children transitioning at like 10 years old and changing their genders and things like that,” he said. “I have become much more skeptical about that sort of thing to say the least, much more skeptical of redistribution plans, DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], stuff like that.”
Campus Reform and The College Fix are among several organizations that help connect a pool of fresh, young journalists with right-leaning views — such as Walker — to jobs in conservative media.
Administrators at the organizations say the news ecosystem is too entrenched with liberal journalists working for news outlets that promote liberal ideology while underplaying, ignoring or misrepresenting conservative perspectives on stories those on the right care about. It’s a complaint that has been around for decades and gave rise to such conservative platforms as the National Review in the 1950s, “The Rush Limbaugh Show” in the 1980s, Fox News in the 1990s and, most recently, an array of free-wheeling digital sites and blogs amplified by social media.
“Conservative media is trying to make sure they have a pipeline of young people coming over to conservative journalism,” said Anthony Nadler, an associate professor at Ursinus College who has studied conservative media. “The vision of conservative journalism has largely been: produce a cadre of journalists who bring a different set of values to determine what news is and what’s important in the world.”
The organizations want to make sure the next generation of right-leaning journalists is prepared to enter the job market ready to compete for positions at both conservative and mainstream outlets. The training they provide stresses the basic tenets of journalism, such as accuracy, fairness and balance. Some strongly discourage students from writing commentary, at least for now.
Many of the organizations were created by nonprofits that extol conservatism.
The Collegiate Network, which supports students who launch or run alternative campus publications, is a program of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on college campuses. William F. Buckley Jr. was its first president.
The National Journalism Center, which provides journalism training for college students, is a program of Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization led by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Campus Reform, a conservative higher education news site filled with student-written stories, is operated by the Leadership Institute, which cultivates conservative activists and politicians. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is an alum.
A 2020 report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism noted that while there are many paths for conservative journalists to enter the profession, “the least circuitous involves plugging into the modern conservative movement.” Journalists at mainstream outlets are more likely to use educational and social networks to launch their careers, according to the report, which was based on interviews of 22 journalists and editors at 14 online conservative news organizations.
The same report says most of the journalists acknowledged that “misinformation and conspiracy-oriented stories are a problem within the broader conservative news field.” It quotes one of the journalists saying anonymously, “It’s embarrassing, for sure, to be associated with [conspiracy journalists] like that. That’s why you have to be careful about where you work.”
Trust in reporting by the national news media among Republicans dropped significantly between 2016 and 2021 — from 70% to 35%, according to the Pew Research Center. During the same period, trust among Democrats fell at a significantly slower pace, dropping from 83% to 78%, the research found. In 2019, a Pew survey found that Republicans trusted Fox News more than any other news outlet. The conservative network has consistently been the most-watched cable news network for decades.
Critics have long complained that Fox News airs false and misleading content. Fox declined to comment to Quill on those characterizations, but Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath that some network hosts gave viewers false information alleging the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
It’s not perplexing to Emily Jashinsky why conservatives trust Fox more than they do the mainstream press.
“I think it stems from the fact that Fox News is willing to host conversations that are heterodox in mainstream media or by corporate media standards,” said Jashinsky, director of the National Journalism Center. “When everybody else is getting stories like the Russian collusion narrative incorrect, it makes sense that people will trust the one place that is pointing that out. That doesn’t mean that place isn’t going to abuse the trust.”
Aspiring journalists who go through the National Journalism Center’s training get that message. Twice a year, the organization places a group of students in 12-week internships at news outlets in Washington, D.C. Participants spend the first four days of each week working at the mostly conservative outlets. Friday is training day, where they might learn about the inverted pyramid, Associated Press style and interview techniques some weeks and listen to lectures and presentations about the failures of the mainstream press in others. The latter is the part that Jashinsky says is not taught in college journalism classes.
In one session, a speaker described how he got the so-called Russia collusion story wrong, Jashinsky said. Another session picked apart news media missteps in the 2019 coverage of Nicholas Sandmann, then a 16-year-old Catholic high school student from Kentucky who wore a Make America Great Again red cap during a school trip to Washington, D.C., and was portrayed in media as being disrespectful to a Native American activist.
Jashinsky said the program sometimes examines failures of conservative media; Murdoch’s admission of airing false claims about the 2020 election may become one. But overall, the program unravels major errors by mainstream media, she said.
“What we study is mainstream media failures, and the bulk of those tend to be from the left, not from the right,” Jashinsky said. “We come from a belief that, fundamentally, the failure of the mainstream media is a failure of liberal ideology.”
At The College Fix, the training mostly focuses on developing sound journalism habits and learning the technical
aspects of being a reporter. Many of the students major in other disciplines and will never work as journalists, said Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Kabbany. They use the experience to see if it’s something they may be interested in as a career, she said. The Fix wants them to be prepared if they decide to enter the profession, she said.
The College Fix maintains a digital news site filled with stories written by students across the country who are hired to cover issues on their respective campuses. Common topics are abortion, diversity and inclusion programs, efforts to bar conservative speakers from campus and gender equity issues. The stories sometimes catch the eye of professional conservative news organizations that elevate them to a larger national audience.
The Fix has a companion fellowship program that places students or recent graduates at news outlets in Washington, D.C., for about 14 weeks. Charlotte Waldron, a recent graduate of Miami University in Ohio, was so impressed after writing for The Fix and getting a fellowship that she recorded a testimonial video for the group. “The combination of learning the practical skills and making the connections has been so useful to me, and I’m really grateful for The College Fix and would highly recommend it to any college student who’s interested in this field,” she says in the video.
Waldron, who majored in English with a double minor in political science and creative writing, said her fellowship was particularly helpful since the stories she wrote for the two elective journalism classes she took were mostly class assignments. During her fellowship at the Daily Caller, her editor gave her a lot of helpful feedback, she said.
“I would say definitely The College Fix is much more hands-on than any of my classes were,” Waldron said. “Although the second class I took at Miami University had some hands-on writing, it’s more of just homework assignments, and it’s not as much learning through the process of doing. So, I found the College Fix, and working hands-on with you, was really, really helpful versus just sitting in a classroom.”
Isaac Willour is a political science major heading into his senior year at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He wrote for The College Fix and landed a fellowship at The Dispatch, which bills itself as a digital media company “providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary” that’s “informed by conservative principles.”
Willour said working with The Fix was helpful since he wasn’t studying journalism in college. He said he’d prefer a job in political communications, such as speechwriting, but feels prepared to work as a journalist with the training and experience he’s attained. He noted that he has never allowed his political ideology to seep into his news writing, although he knows others who have.
“I feel that The College Fix and a variety of the other outlets I’ve work for, including the Dispatch, have really trained me pretty well for journalism,” Willour said. “I’ve never once felt pressure to ideologically put anything in a story. I know people who’ve worked in news organizations — people who are my friends, people who are my colleagues — who could not say the same. And I’m unbelievably grateful that I’ve never felt that pressure.”
Willour is dismayed that some news organizations give their audience misinformation or present conspiracy theories as fact, which he said can have consequences. He suspects the motivation behind it may be money, or perhaps apprehension about making the other side look good.
Nadler, one of the authors of the Tow Center report, believes that could be true, but it’s not the full story. Conservative storytellers relentlessly paint mainstream media and other institutions as part of a liberal power alliance that sees conservatives as morally backward and beneath participation in the public sphere, he said. Liberal media are shown as villains who look down upon and condemn broad social groups they associate with conservatism — blue-collar workers, Christians, white people, and residents of rural areas among them, Nadler said.
The narrative creates the perception that conservatives’ entire identity is under attack by liberals.
“Conservative media focuses on telling this really powerful, emotional story that they, the liberal elites, think of you as a piece of shit,” Nadler said. “And that’s the big story.”
Rod Hicks is director of ethics and diversity for the Society of Professional Journalists. Follow him on Twitter @rodhicks.
Featured photo: Emily Jashinsky, director of the National Journalism Center, addresses students in the program, which provides internships and training that prepares aspiring journalists for jobs at conservative media. Jashinsky also is culture editor at The Federalist. (Photo by Bob Updegrove)
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