Last week, writer Ben Howe (formerly of RedState) penned an op-ed for the Daily Beast wherein he reprimanded conservative outlets for failing to engage in more original reporting and hoped more George Soros-like right-wing billionaires would sponsor original reporting from right-of-center publications. The piece did not go over well among right-of-center publications, and for good reason. Still, there’s something to this debate over the media and its conservative counterpoints that’s worth expanding on.
The problem is not quite, as Howe argued, that conservative outlets don’t do much original reporting — it’s that they do and the biggest news outlets largely ignore it. This is not only why conservative and libertarian donors helped fund said outlets in the first place, but more importantly that a deep chasm exists between the two that will never be repaired. Instead of wishing for it to become whole again, conservatives must make peace with the rift, accept that the bigger media outlets will never let them into their clique, and march ever forward.
Unfortunately, this isn’t true, and only a bit of original reporting by Howe would have shown this. Several known conservative media outlets engage in meaty journalism: The Daily Caller, Breitbart, The Blaze, National Review, and The Federalist, to name a few. The Washington Examiner’s opinion section leans conservative, but boasts a solid objective news team. Some have a more narrow focus than others, and on a smaller scale than CNN obviously, but they produce original reporting. Still, Howe was only willing to give credit to the Washington Free Beacon as an example of excellent original reporting from a conservative outlet.
Howe could have also given credit to the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney for the original reporting he includes in opinion pieces on crony capitalism, which he’s been doing for years. At The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway has regularly engaged in original reporting, debunking some of the mainstream media’s obsession with Russia, Trump, and collusion to the point of exhaustion. (Full disclosure: I regularly write for both of those publications.) Chuck Ross and Peter J. Hasson at the Daily Caller offer incredible original reporting on the White House and national security issues. The list could go on and on.
I’m not just saying this because I write for primarily right-of-center outlets (though I have had my share of bylines published in The Atlantic, Politico, and the New York Times), nor am I saying all is well in conservative media land. But in accusing conservative media of doing almost no reporting, Howe actually seems to miss the greater struggle conservative media outlets face.
Howe alludes to the bigger issue when he gives a lengthy and mostly accurate history of how conservative media came to be: a slew of Davids fighting Goliaths in the land of bias because the big media narrative continued to overpower (and some conservatives would say pollute) every story, making them more unfavorable to conservatives and favorable for liberals. “No longer did Republicans, conservatives, right-wingers need to parse through the bias of the MSM elites to try and find truth. An army of basement-dwelling amateurs with more skill and time on their hands than research interns at the big networks started to pick apart what might have been unchallenged reporting at one time,” he observes.
It’s been more than two decades since Drudge Report first broke the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. And though some things have shifted in how they report news, the main media outlets still refrain from quoting too many conservative media outlets in their own reporting (note that the Daily Beast declined to run this piece as a rebuttal to Howe). Howe bemoans this fact and uses it as evidence that conservative media must not be doing their job — yet therein lies the rub: Many conservative publications began to do both original reporting and commentary because they wanted to combat and compete with mainstream reporting that had morphed into full-blown bias or even liberal propaganda. The goal was to provide reporting on issues the big outlets and liberal outlets were ignoring entirely. The goal was to become a new source of news, commentary, and even clickbait for a new group of people who knew better than to see glowing coverage of Bill Clinton in the middle of a sexual scandal with his intern.
While Howe’s piece is meant to be a critique of conservative outlets and a call for more financial backing while demanding they do better, it’s more of a nostalgic fantasy (one which many conservative outlets perhaps share) to be included in the clique that is the so-called mainstream media. The goal of conservative outlets wasn’t to be quoted by the main media outlets (and if it is, they will be forever disappointed). The chasm between the major outlets and conservative outlets has never been larger, and it will never be repaired.
Instead of trying to bridge the gap, or repair the wounds with a Band-Aid, conservative-leaning outlets will do better if they forget about how they weren’t invited to the dance they didn’t like anyway and continue to march to the beat of their own drummer.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
