WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Moira Gleason: Wall Street Journal Rago Fellow

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Hillsdale graduate Moira Gleason joins WRFH to discuss receiving of one the 2026 Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowships for Excellence in Journalism.As Rago Fellows, Gleason will work with the Opinion section of The Wall Street Journal through a nine-month internship beginning this fall. The Fellowship is named in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Joseph Rago, who was a rising star at The Wall Street Journal and a key member of its Editorial Board before he passed away at the age of 34 in 2017.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Chauvin. And joining me today is Mora Gleeson. She is a Hillsdale graduate, part of the class of 2026, and recently the recipient of the 26 Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism. Thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Okay, so for listeners who aren't familiar with a fellowship,

what does that fellowship entail and what opportunities does it provide? since you've just been awarded it. What a great honor. Yes, I'm very excited. So the Joseph Rego Memorial Fellowship in Journalism is a nine-month fellowship at the Wall Street Journal. It's funded through the Fund for American Studies. And it was set up in honor of Joseph Rago. He was a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and he passed away in 2017 at a young age. And so his parents have very generously funded this opportunity for young journalists every year since I think I'm forgetting which year it started, but it's been, it's been like 2019 maybe. Okay, awesome. So yes, so the fellowship is nine months on the Wall Street Journal

Opinions page. I am working for the features section. So if you like open the Wall Street Journal, there's three pages of opinions. And one, the one with the unsigned editorials, that's, that's the editorial team. That's not me. The other two pages are me. So I'm helping to edit opinions. So audits, submissions, columnists, and then I get to do some of my own writing as well. That's incredible. And you do that for nine months. Is there like some kind of mentorship as well that goes along with it or like classes? Or is it just kind of that opportunity to be a part of that part of the Wall Street Journal? I think anytime that you're part of a T-FAS program, it kind of comes with a lot of mentorship just because everyone in T-FAS is like very invested in you and very supportive. So there are a couple of special events that throughout the year for Rago fellows, but it is mostly. the work at the journal and the network that you enter into. Everyone, I started early as a Bartley Fellow, which is the Wall Street Journal's normal summer

internship. So I'm doing two fellowships back to back. So right now I'm doing basically the same work that I will be doing as a Rego Fellow in the fall. And I can say that everyone on the opinions page has been just so welcoming and so encouraging towards me. I feel like everyone here wants me to succeed and is willing to help me. So it's been an awesome experience so far. I was wondering how, so like, how did you find out about the fellowship? It sounds like, I mean, you've done a little bit of work with them in the past, but yeah,

like, how did it kind of get on your radar? And then, like, why do you think your work specifically kind of fit this fellowship perfectly? I've been hearing about Joe Rago for years, actually, because he, if you walk into the Collegian Office, she'll see a bunch of posters from previous Pulliam Fellows at Hillsdale. And those are, um, professional journalists who came in to teach a course and give a talk. And one of them was Joseph Rago before my time, but his picture is still up there. He came and spoke about Obamacare and writing about healthcare. So I've been hearing about him, hearing about that legacy for a while.

And I've been reading the Wall Street Journal since I was little and my dad used to buy it. Oh, that's awesome. This has just been on my radar for a while. I didn't know about the specific fellowship until a couple of years ago. I think when I was pretty seriously considering going into journalism. So the Dow Journalism program at Hillsdale, John Miller, Maria Servold were very helpful, kind of setting me up for these types of opportunities and, yeah, helping me prepare. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Today we have Mora Gleason on, a Hillsdale grad as part of the class of 2026, and recently the recipient of the 26 Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism.

When did you realize that journalism was the path that you wanted to pursue, like, not just as an interest or a campus involvement, but also as a career? Oh, gosh, I don't know. I mean, it sounds like maybe this is a path you've been going on. Like for a while, if you were growing up reading the Wall Street Journal, which I feel like is probably a more unique experience, which is awesome. I just read everything. So I think it was there, so I read it. But I didn't actually want to go into journalism at all until I got to Hillsdale. Like, it wasn't even something I was thinking about. I thought, like, I was an English major, so I kind of didn't know what I wanted to do. I thought I would probably get into law school. But I started writing for the Collegiate. freshman year and I just loved it. Like I've always loved writing, but this was something where I got to like learn about new things, talk to interesting people, and write all the time. It was just like this incredible opportunity. So I think like maybe end of sophomore year, junior year, I started to think this might actually be something that I can do for a career. Yeah. Probably after a

advanced writing with Mr. Miller. She's just a fantastic class and I got so much better and I still loved it and I was like, okay, maybe I should write for a career. Maybe I should do this. I mean, this is a more general question about like journalism. But like what do you think makes a good journalist? Yeah. I think one thing is always asking questions. There's a lot of hot topics and everyone wants to have their take and experience. And, explain what they think about it. But if you're going to be really good at journalism and like I'm not I'm not a shining example yet but I work with a lot of people who are. You really have to be willing to go a little bit deeper and ask questions, investigate.

Assume that you don't know anything. That's how you like learn what's actually going on instead of stopping at that surface level like hot take on whatever the issue. of the day is. Yeah. Yeah, like, just like being willing to just kind of dig as deep as necessary. Hey. Yeah. And also, I kind of like the spot that I'm in as a journalist because I know that I'm not an expert on all of these things that I'm writing about. Like, right now I'm trying to write about energy policy and I was an English major. Don't know about that. But by the, just like approaching people who do know a lot, there's like, there's a lot of joy in like in getting to learn something new all the time. And like that's my job. Yeah, for sure. But it's,

I think I get to view this cool middle ground between like the average person reading the journal or the average voter who wants to understand these issues and how they're at play in the world and the political, the political world at the time. But I'm kind of like I can mediate between the professionals and the policy experts who know everything at a high level and then people who want to just understand what's going on. And I like being that kind of middle ground in speaking to both sides. This is Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. Today we have more. Gleason, a Hillsdale graduate as part of the class of 2026. And she's on talking about how she was

recently named the recipient of the 26 Joseph Regal Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism. You mentioned, like, as you started to answer that question, that, like, as a journalist, yeah, you're kind of almost signing up for, like, lifelong learning. Like, you have to be curious. You have to be willing to want to, like, investigate these things. And I was just wondering, like, as someone who's a curious person, what do you find yourself, like, naturally reading or wanting to write about even like if no one was paying you for it. I do have a substack. So I am doing that too.

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. I'm very, I'm very young at this. So I'm like, I'm still like learning how like what makes a good story and where to look for stories.

But something someone told me when I first got here like last month. Um, she said like, just always have like your notes app or, um, or a notebook with you because anything can be a story. Like someone tells you something cool that's going on in the city or, you know, you hear of like a policy that passed and you want to see how it affects like normal people. Yeah.

On Donnie government grocery stores and what's going to happen to the bodega owner on the corner. Like really anything could be a story if you just like keep track of all of the interesting things that people tell you that come up during the day. And then like 90% of them won't be anything, but then you'll find those like 10%. So I think the type of writing that I would do if no one was ever going to pay me for it, which is likely. I'm really interested in cultural trends, the way that people choose to spend their time and what that tells you about. the things that they value and the way that they're going to act. I think this is a really observable. It's a really evident phenomenon with social media.

Yeah, for sure. There are things like take the World Cup. Like, I think one of the most interesting things to come out of that was all of these Europeans coming to the U.S. discovering the Midwest and like all of the sudden all of these Germans are like Kansas is so cool. And I love ranch all of a sudden. Yeah. Exactly. And I love ranch dressing. And I think things like that are really interesting because it changes. It's changing the way that like Europe thinks about America when they've been presented this image of, of, you know, whatever like over like immature consumer.

society. And it also kind of changes the way that Americans are thinking about themselves. Because all of a sudden, there's like a little bit of patriotism coming back. It's like there are people like, yeah, you know what? America is pretty cool. Like, especially when like media has been fueling this kind of anti-American sentiment for so long. It was cool to see just kind of a slight pushback in the other direction. So that's something I've been thinking about a little bit this summer. At the Wall Street Journal, the free expression page, which I'm not part of, but they're really cool. They wrote about this a little bit, and they went and talked to people in New York, just did some like man on the street.

Just to kind of tap into that phenomenon of like how the World Cup was like changing the way that both Americans and Europeans were thinking about American culture. Do you think you would want to end up hopefully doing that kind of work in the future? I would love to, yeah. I think the first step for me is just learning the skill set. Yeah, for sure. So right now I'm getting a lot of training and editing and reporting. And yeah, I would love to eventually do some of that kind of like cultural reporting.

But yeah, we'll see. It's kind of taking it one step at a time. Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Today we have Mora Gleason joining us at Hillsdale grad as part of the class of 2026 and recently the recipient of the 26 Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism. So obviously you were awarded this fellowship opportunity under Joseph Rago's name. So I was wondering what about his legacy you would like to try to recover in your own writing in your own career. And as you kind of like think about that and talk about it, I was wondering if

you could also just maybe bring up a couple of other journalists who you look up to and he would want to try to imitate. Yeah, absolutely. I think Rago is really cool because he was a history major at Dartmouth, like liberal arts education, came into journalism with like bachelor's degree, same as me. But he became, just he was so good at researching and talking to people and he became one of the best sourced journalists on healthcare in America and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials for the Wall Street Journal on Obamacare. So I just think it's amazing someone who comes from a liberal arts background studying history and was just like really interested in learning could go and

than Winni Pulitzer for writing about health care. Just the, the, it's, he just had like such ability to learn and willingness to learn. And then he wrote, like, if you go back and read his editorials from the journal, they're not, he wrote with such wit. And it's just, it's informative, but it's also like a little bit interesting. entertaining. And I, like, aspire to to reach that style because if you can write about something serious and complicated in a way that's, like, entertaining but also serious, that's a really

hard balance to strike. So he's definitely one of the role models for me. I come from similar educational background. I mean, liberal arts was an English major. Yeah. But, same kind of set up and yeah I would love to to be as excellent as he was there are a lot of journalists out there that I admire I think when I was at Hillsdale I would read a lot of Maddie Kern's work she was at National Review and now she's at the free press and she's really like well she wrote a lot about abortion and women's health care and has just done some work in an area that a lot of people are interested in but she found a way to talk about issues that nobody else was talking about like alternative reproductive health care

and what's happening to women who have like covering from abortions or this is kind of a topic that I'm interested in personally but yeah she found out right about it that was new and that's that's that's kind of hard this is like feel free to like take a second to because I don't know this is kind of like a larger question but this is something that I'm like personally curious about and I don't know if you've thought about this as far as like it's journalism has become something that for so many people is so like people are kind of hesitant like media trust is so low and like have you kind of thought about the kind of journalist that you want to be that can kind of like make you a credible source and like try to restore like journalism

to be something that like people can trust yeah absolutely i think hillsdale is doing really good work with the journalism program um you the biggest thing that i notice is a lot of media will kind of take the shortcut they'll take the easy route by criticizing the person it's like this is not a new phenomenon but um the ad hominem attacks and the the just like relentless criticism of people instead of ideas i think really damages your credibility yeah this is something editor at the journal told me but um when you're writing about a person you're criticizing their ideas you're not criticizing the person so yeah i think that's really important because you want people to trust you, you want to be fair, you want to have integrity

when you're writing, and like it's really easy to fall into like, this person is so stupid. That's not what you're here to talk about like the ideas and hopefully change policy or have an influence on culture and you don't get that by attacking people. Yeah, for sure. No, I think that's a great person. perspective to have. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much. This has been Mora Gleason, 26, Hillsdale Grad, and recently the recipient of the 26th, Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism. My name is Chauvinhawain-Weed, and this has been Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.