Somewhere along the line, conservatism abandoned faith in good journalism and became a cult of personality — or personalities. We made celebrities out of people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, whose thinking is often paranoid and whose work is sloppy. The result is the current implosion in conservative media, triggered by the reckless antisemitism of Carlson, Owens, and Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi troll who was disastrously platformed by Carlson.
It didn’t have to be this way. When the rise of the internet gave conservatives a chance to level the playing field starting in the 1990s, it was an opportunity for excellence. We could produce better and more accurate journalism than the Washington Post and the New York Times. I had walked away from the Washington Post because the editors were changing my editorials to reflect liberal dogma.
