The Daily Signal - News Flash: Bias In Media Is Not New, Seasoned Journalist Says

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

John Miller entered the field of journalism in Washington D.C. in the early 1990s. There were only a handful of outlets staffing conservative commentary writers at the time, and, even then, Miller says he remembers being frustrated by the liberal bias in the media.  “This notion that, you know, a generation ago we used to have objective reporters at The New York Times is nonsense,” Miller, executive director of The College Fix, says. “I mean, they were doing the same thing back then, also pretending they were something they were not. They were putting their finger on the scale constantly when they were covering elections, and candidates, and debates, and Congress, and so forth.”  Today, Miller argues that conservative have “a louder voice today than they've ever had before in the media.” But the challenge now, according to Miller, “is populating this media with good writers, with good talkers, people who can make podcasts and so on. And lots of folks are doing it, obviously, but we need more people coming in and more talented people coming in.”  In addition to leading The College Fix, Miller also serves as director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College, where he daily takes part in training young conservative journalists. He is a board member of The Daily Signal.  Miller joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss what has, and has not, changed in the field of journalism, and how he is actively working to train young conservative journalists.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nothing else is Rees. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, September 16th. I'm Virginia Allen. You know, there are few people that have had more influence on the field of journalism and specifically conservative journalism and influence on young conservative journalists than John Miller. John Miller serves as the director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College. He also heads the college fix. He's written countless news articles and more publications than I can live. here, multiple books, and in full disclosure, he is also a board member of The Daily Signal. And so we are so pleased to have joining us today, John Miller. Thank you so much for being with us today, Mr. Miller. My pleasure, Virginia. Thanks for having me on. Well, I would love to jump in just by talking a little bit about your past in the field of journalism. Did you set out with the intention of being a journalist or was it something

you sort of fell into early on in life? I was a kid who liked to read books and was then drawn to writing, I guess, and had teachers who encouraged me growing up. So by the time I got to college, I went to University of Michigan, I was definitely thinking about writing and journalism. And I fell into a publication in Ann Arbor, the Michigan Review, which was the conservative or libertarian newspaper on campus and became involved in that and did that for four years. And that led to a career as a professional writer. Wow. And now you're based in Michigan. I love the fact that on your own website, you start off by describing yourself as someone

that lives down a rural dirt road in Michigan. And yet you're writing for a lot of really large outlets across the U.S. and training other journalists to do so. Where does that love for you of training come from, and specifically training young journalists. Well, I lived in Washington, D.C. for 20 years. And most of my time there as a journalist was at National Review Magazine. And one of the things I discovered I enjoyed about writing for the magazine being a part of that enterprise,

and I'm still with it now. I still write for it. I have two weekly podcasts. I'm still involved at National Review. But one of the things I discovered that I enjoyed was working with the interns. We would bring in usually one every summer. and they were really good. We had really amazingly good interns

and people who are in the business now, like Matt Contonetti, John McCormick, Mike Warren. These guys are total pros right now, but we got them in college. And I was able to work with them. I enjoyed working with them. These are bright young people,

smart, they made my job easier, and so on. I just enjoyed doing it and became more and more involved with working with young writers, some of the groups that do that and so forth. And around about 2009, 2010, I thought, you know, there's some organizations that serve the interests of young people who are interested in going into journalism and so forth. But I had an idea for a different kind of group. And so I started

the college fix. And this, this, this, it's an organization run by professional journalists, but we can work with any student on any campus in America to, to train them up, to, to find them, recruit them, train them in journalism, let them try it out, see if they have a talent for it, see if they enjoy it, and then help them launch a career. So it goes back to just an experience and recognize there's a need for recruiting certain kinds of kids into the profession and then having an idea for how to help them. Well, and the college fix has really become such a go-to source for what is actually happening on U.S. college campuses. I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that school is back in session and so are protests and just right away off the

bat. We've already seen pro-Palestine protest breaking out on college campuses. And that's something that repeatedly over the years, the college fixes has just really been on the forefront of is allowing conservative students often on these very, very far-left college campuses to not only have a voice, but also just expose what's happening on their campuses. Well, the college fix is two things. And the first thing it is, and the thing that 99% of people know it for is as a higher education news website. So if you want to know what's going on, on college campuses, you come to the website and read our content. We have a team of professional journalists who then work with student contributors who write original news articles. They're not

doing opinion. Occasionally we'll have an opinion piece, but they're doing reported news stories while it's really happening on campuses. We cover the protests and the encampments and anti-Semitism on campus. We cover cancel culture. We cover religious freedom. We cover these kinds of controversies, and we do it as we do these as news stories. And so on our site every day, you get original content detailing what's going on. And most people who come to the College Fix, that's what they're doing.

They're just coming to read the articles and that's a perfectly good way. And I encourage people come visit thecollegefix.com and read this content produced by these students who are learning how to become journalists. The other thing we're doing, though, it's a dual mission,

the second mission, which is not hidden, or secret, it's just less obvious, is we are trying to recruit these young people and train them up and encourage them in this field because not enough young conservatives go into the professional media. We're always, as conservatives, we're always complaining about liberal media bias. The left dominates the media, and that's all true. It does, but the number one reason why that's true is because not enough conservatives go into the profession. And if we're ever going to solve this problem, more need to think about it professionally.

Why don't more conservatives do it right now? I'm a little mystified by this because I did it myself. I love it. I can't imagine doing another thing. It's a great fun field to be in, and you feel like you're in a conversation about the great topics of the day. You're staying up with the news. You're breaking stories.

You're giving interpretations and so on. I mean, what an amazing opportunity to do. do. And what we're saying is, please, come join us. And with the college fix, if you're 18, 19, 20 years old on any campus in America, you can come try it out. We'll work with you. You can decide that this is not for you and move on and go to law school or whatever other mistake you might make. Or in many cases, we find people who think this is kind of fun and they get paid for their work and they try, then to do a fellowship with us and then they entered the profession. So we have lots of alumni of the program who are now professional journalists. But that's the other purpose of

the college fix is to help these young people move into the professional media. What or maybe who, rather, are some of the greatest success stories, would you say of the college fix? Well, we have more than, I think, 125 alumni of our fellowship program and hundreds more students who just wrote for us. They just were contributors. Then the fellowship program means you went through a paid fellowship. You worked at a news organization, usually in Washington, D.C., and so on. But who are some of the great alumni of it? Number one, I'd say, is Kyle Peterson, who's an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal. The career is thriving.

If you read the unsigned editorials, the editorial board editorials at the Wall Street Journal, he is writing many of them. He's a top graduate. We have the current Washington correspondent of The Economist is, is, is an alumnus of our program. Jack Butler, who is my colleague at National Review, wrote for the college fix. He was also a journalism student at Hillsdale College, so I got him a couple different ways. But these, they are all over the place and they are thriving in so many different ways and making a difference. Yeah, really powerful. We're so thankful for that,

because we here at the Daily Signal have benefited firsthand from those young people that have written for the college fix who've come on to then intern here. Of course, Elizabeth formerly Troutman, now Mitchell, was a graduate of Hillsdale just recently and now is our reporting fellow here at The Daily Signal. But Mr. Miller, you mentioned a moment ago that issue with just how far left so much of the media really is right now. And that kind of causes me to wonder, is truly middle of the road, unbiased, straight journalism? Is it possible now? Or do we kind of need to accept the fact of, okay, there's always going to be biased, everyone's human?

And so better for just news outlets to be really clear, hey, we lean left, we lean right, and kind of just give up an effort to even be not biased. What drives me nuts is when they pretend to be something they are not. So if you saw the ABC News forum, the debate with the presidential candidates, I mean, my gosh, you know, they're pretending to be something they are not. They're pretending to be neutral and objective. And we saw they're incapable of that. They are taking sides.

If you're going to take sides, at least admit that you're doing it. You know, when I joined, when I became a professional writer, when I graduated from university, Michigan, early 1990s, I went out to Washington, D.C. and started working in the field. And as a conservative in it, I was finding my place. And, you know, if you wanted to get into political opinion writing, if you were conservative, there were only a handful of places you could work. You know, National Review is one of them. There were some editorial pages, you know, Wall Street Journal, then some regional city papers and that kind of thing. There were a few other publications and so forth. But we were also frustrated with the liberal media back then. And this notion

that, you know, a generation ago, we used to have objective reporters of the New York Times is nonsense. I mean, they were doing the same thing back then, also pretending they were something they were not. They were putting their finger on the scale constantly when they were covering elections and candidates and debates in Congress and so forth. They always denied it. And it drove us nuts. And back in that day, I used to kind of think, wouldn't it be better if we had more voices in the media and greater diversity and so on. And to a certain extent, we've gotten that now, thanks to the internet and the disruption of it and how it's broken up the left wing monopoly on the news. Look, the left still dominates the media.

They dominate all the major sources of it. But, you know, I remember when there was no Fox News. I remember when there was no daily signal, when there was no daily wire, no Washington Freebeacon. There was, you know, there's a whole universe of publications that that exists now because it, the internet made impossible. And so we actually do have a kind of flourishing right of center media establishment. It's dwarfed by the left. But we have voices in the conversations and the news that we did not have a generation ago. And it's riotous. It's messy. There's great journalism. There's lousy journalism. There's everything in between. But I think it's better than what we had.

it has its frustrations and so forth. But conservatives have a louder voice today than they've ever had before in the media. And one of our challenges now is populating this media with good writers, with good talkers, people who can make podcasts and so on. And lots of folks are doing it, obviously, but we need more people coming in and more talented people coming in and just get better and better and better. at it. Yeah, and that's where the college fix comes in and the work of Hillsdale College. Do you think of that overall is the biggest shift since you enter the field of journalism that you've seen is that rise of maybe some of these smaller, more conservative outlets than conservatives having more of a voice? Have there been some other major shifts and changes

within the field of journalism? Yeah, well, it's the internet and it's disruptions. I mean, I grew up where the most powerful institution in American journalism was the, the, the nightly news broadcast, you know, which was appointment television, you know, at dinner time, you would sit down and watch Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather or Peter Jennings. One of those three, you know, those were your choice, was one of those three. And that's what millions of Americans did every night. I don't know when was the last time I watched the nightly news from the networks, right? And, and I mean, I mean, people still do, but it's nothing compared to what it once was.

and where did they always got, where did they get their news from? Always from the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. So you had liberal newspapers driving the nightly news agenda and so forth. And that's what it was in the 80s and the early 90s and so on. That's completely broken up. And while the New York Times and the Washington Post are still very influential, and still I imagine a lot of people watch those broadcasts, it's nothing like what it was.

And now we have alternative voices. and you have the Daily Signal pursuing stories that the Washington Post doesn't care about, would prefer to ignore, and bringing forth stories that otherwise people would not hear. The new challenge, of course, is that we often don't talk to each other, right? The readers of the Washington Post are not reading the Daily Signal and vice versa, often true as well. And that's a kind of new challenge, also the role of big tech in all of this, and it's algorithms and it's it's it's it's it's it's it's a censorship and it's shadow banning and all

that that's a kind of a new problem as well but it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a coccopinous kind of world of of media and journalism right now and it's never been a better environment for for conservatives on that social media piece is wild the fact that really now if you want to be a journalist but you don't want to be on x it's it's almost laughable i mean the two now seem like They're just synonymous with each other. You have to, as much as I have never met someone that says, oh, I just love X. I love social media. But yet we all have to play the game if you want to have your stories out there.

Well, I'll go ahead and say it. I like social media. There we go. You're the first one. I mean, it can be nasty. Yeah. And I don't like the way it's often manipulated by the companies behind it. But having said that, you know, Facebook has been a great way for me to stay in touch with them.

family. Also, if you use Twitter in a certain kind of way, it can become a really good news feed. If you want to know what are people talking about, what's the conversation? You know, when the debate ended the other night, the first thing I did is I went on Twitter. I wanted to know what are people saying about this? You know, who do you think want? And there were different opinions and different views and so forth. But you could see, you could see opinion coming together and coalescing and so forth. And you you could almost watch conventional wisdom form on Twitter. And that has this dangers as well, the way you can kind of consolidate these sorts of things.

But look, I like it. I use it. It's a good tool for news and information gathering. And it shouldn't be your only tool. There should be other ways you get your news and information. But it's a useful way. And if you handle it the right way, and there are ways to use it poorly,

it's easy to use poorly. It can become a tremendous asset, too. for a reporter, for a journalist, but also for an ordinary American to learn about what's going on. Yeah. Well, you all at the college fix, you're certainly doing an amazing job of utilizing these new tools. And one of them is a new video project that you all are working on called the Restore the Media Video Series. Share with us what that is, what the mission of this project is. So we received an innovation award from the Heritage Foundation to pursue this idea, and we're grateful to Heritage for providing that. This is a project.

We would not have had the means to pursue without the Heritage Foundation's innovation grant giving us the capability to do it. So we're grateful for that. And what we're trying to do, and we're in the middle of it and we're still making it up as we go along. But the vision is we need to do a better job of recruiting young people into the professional media. And right now, how does someone come to the college fix right now? How do we get the students who write for us now? the number one recruiters is just word of mouth. It's students telling their friends about it.

Occasionally an organization will promote what we do, but they kind of hear about it and come to us. We take a few positive steps to recruit. We are reading student campus newspapers, trying to look for interesting voices and so on and inviting them to come join us. We need to do a much better job of finding these students who are at least interested in trying out

journalism. And in any, you know, I think in last school year, we worked with about 125 kids. I think there have got to be more than 125 kids in America who are willing to take a chance with this, willing to try this out, get paid for their articles and decided, is this a career for me? How do we find them? So we're starting this video series that is going to reach into the internet in every way possible to tell stories about why this is a fun profession. What, what, what, you do, why it's compelling, how so many of us enjoy it. Also, how to break in. Also, is there a future in it? People worry about, you know, our newspapers dying and they may be dying. But, you know, what does the future journalism look like? Should you be optimistic about it? And the

bottom line answer there is, is yes, there will always be media. There will always be a need for content creators. There's such a hunger for good storytelling. There will be ways for people to to find jobs doing this. We're trying to point all that out. So this video series, we're putting it together. We just did our first filming this week in New York. We have a lot more ahead of us, but we're going to put together some shows and some mini documentaries and little 30-second segments and so forth.

And our hope ultimately we're going to recruit more great young people into journalism. And how do you see within that as more conservative journalists come into the field. How do you see the field of journalism changing in the next maybe 10 years? It's obviously changed so much in the past two decades. How is it going to continue to evolve? Right. So I'm not great with predictions. And I, you know, I couldn't have imagined Twitter before it happened, but it's, you know, blogging was a thing. And Twitter, Twitter took so much of its energy and so forth. Will there be another thing? I don't know. I am confident that there will always be a role for people who want to report and tell stories and so on. What does that look like in the future?

I think good writing. We always need good writers, but increasingly this is a visual medium. It's a spoken medium through podcasts. And, you know, what are we doing right now, Virginia? Is this a podcast or this is a video show, right? It's both. And you need to be, you know, to succeed in this field, it is good to be conversational, to be good, good, you know, know how to work on television, this sort of thing, you don't have to. We still need great writers who are exclusively writers, but to the extent you can do different things and flourish in these different mediums or kinds of media, this is what the future I think is going to look like. But who knows, we just need talented people who have a thirst for news. They like to tell stories. And from our

standpoint, have a certain kind of worldview that is heterodox compared to most of the of the media, bring new ideas into the conversation. It's important for America that we do this. And, you know, the press is important. The First Amendment gives us freedom of the press. There's a reason it's in the First Amendment. The founders thought this wasn't important. We need a strong media that has lots of different kinds of views and we need more conservatives in it. So that's what we're trying to do with the college fix. What is one piece of advice you would give to a young person who's saying, yeah, I like to write, I love telling the truth. Maybe journalism is for me. What would you?

say to them? I say try it out. And with the college fix, you can do that. There's like no obligation, right? You can, you can learn about it from us. We'll give you story ideas. Our professional letters will work with you to turn your product into actually a professional fully fact-checked work of journalism. And they'll tell you, they'll give you a story ideas. They make these phone calls, check out this stuff, and you'll get it into good shape. So these, our editors are professionals. They're professional journalists. They're veterans of the industry. But they're also co- their mentors, their trainers, they know how to do all this. And our mission is to take amateurs who want to try this out and turn them into professionals.

And by the way, you can make a little bit of money. We pay for the articles too. So this is a good beer and pizza money if you're a college student just to try it out. And if you don't like it, if you want to go do another thing, that's fine. But if you do like it, you can keep writing for us. You can try a fellowship program before us. We will pay you to go work at a professional news organization. And then ultimately, we'll help you a job placement and career counseling and so on.

We stay in touch with our alumni, try and help each other out. So we'll be with you for a long time if this is something you want to try and then pursue. Excellent. Well, for anyone who is interested in pursuing that, whether you just want to read the stories that the college fix puts out, or you think, you know what, I want to try my hand at this. I want to try writing. I'm interested in this field of journalism. you can visit the website thecollegefix.com. That's thecollegefix.com.

And if you want to hear more from Mr. Miller, he has his own website, hey miller.com. Make sure to check that out. Follow his work there as well. But Mr. Miller, I really want to thank you for your time and for the work that you're doing at Hillsdale at the College Fix across the conservative movement, across the field of journalism. It is definitely something that is so needed at this moment in history. And so we really thank you for that giant, yes, you have given to so many young people in walking with them into the field of journalism and showing them what it looks like to be a strong

conservative voice within journalism. Well, thank you, Virginia. Keep up the great work at The Daily Signal. Oh, thank you so much. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new shows. And if you would, take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. We're going to be right back here with you.

you around 5 p.m. for top news. Have a great rest of your Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Louis and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph Von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.