Cowards: What Politicians, Radicals, and the Media Refuse to Say

by Glenn Beck

  And they would see these not as liberal positions but as decent, intelligent positions. They also thought their views were utterly in line with those of the majority of Americans. In a way that’s what’s at the heart of our modern political disputes, a disagreement over where the mainstream is and what “normal” is, politically and culturally. I think a lot of the young people at the networks didn’t really know what normal was in America, and I hold this view because after working six years in broadcasting and three in New York, I no longer knew what normal was.

  A small example. Once I wrote a radio script in which I led into a story by saying, “This Sunday morning you’ll probably be home reading the papers or out at brunch with friends, but Joe Smith will be . . .” A middle-aged editor listened as he walked by the studio and approached me afterward. “Peggy, a small point but maybe not so insignificant: This Sunday morning most Americans will be at church.”

  He was, of course, correct. But I forgot. I wasn’t at church on Sunday mornings, I was in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue eating mushroom omelets and reading the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times .

  I can relate to her story. After working in New York City for six years wasn’t sure if I knew what normal was anymore, either. Is seventy-five dollars a day to park your car normal in America? What about constant honking and yelling in the streets? Is it normal to pay four thousand dollars a month in rent for a one-bedroom, 700-square-foot apartment? Is it normal to have gun laws so strict that it takes a year for a license just to get one in your home (and a permit to carry a handgun is virtually impossible)? Is it normal that everyone sends their kids to private schools and laughs at homeschoolers? Are organic markets on every corner normal? What about activists with petitions for every liberal cause known to man combing the streets each day looking for signatures—is that normal?

  I think you get my point: it’s really easy to become really jaded, really fast.

  Thirty years have passed since Noonan’s editor gently corrected her, but I’d submit that things aren’t that much different in Manhattan newsrooms today.

  The truth is that we shouldn’t be all that surprised that the media gets the story wrong so much of the time. To be fair, if the circumstances were reversed, it would be tough for us, too. Imagine someone from the Heartland being dropped off in midtown Manhattan and told to report on New York City life. You might try your best to report accurately on what you’re seeing, but you’ll never succeed because you have no context. Is traffic on the George Washington Bridge really heavy that day, or is that how it always is? Would you describe a certain crime as “particularly gruesome” or is it just that you’ve never seen a murder victim before? Your life experience from growing up in the Heartland is completely different and there’s simply no way to change that overnight.

  That is exactly what has happened with the New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.–based media. They simply don’t have the context to understand the rest of the country. How can you fairly report on guns if you’ve never seen one in person, or never fired one at a range, or if you live in a city like New York where you’re banned from carrying one? How can you fairly report on issues of religion if you’re an atheist? How can you fairly report on wars if you’ve never even known anyone who’s served in the military?

  “The primary responsibility of the media is accountability of government. . . .”

  —Tim Russert

  A news anchor who worked at one of the big stations in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s told me that he remembers what it was like reporting on the early days of the first Gulf War. It suddenly struck him like a slap to the forehead: in a large newsroom of maybe one hundred people, he was the only veteran. The people around him didn’t even know where to start when talking about military operations.

  Scott Baker, whom I mentioned earlier in the Dan Rather story, once worked at CBS News on a fellowship program right out of college. He told me that he remembers the little old ladies in his church being aghast at his decision to join the media. They thought maybe he should go to seminary to be a pastor. But working with . . . Dan Rather? They began to question his faith! It would have gone over easier had he defected to the Soviet Union.

  When I first met Scott he described to me a strange encounter he’d had in a hallway a few weeks after he’d moved to Manhattan and started working.

  A young man reached out to stop him in the hallway. “Hey, are you Scott Baker?”

  Scott paused for a second and replied, “I think so, yes.”

  The young man seemed excited. “I heard about you—you’re a Republican!”

  Scott looked around the hallway to see who might be listening. He thought for a second. Maybe this was some kind of a rookie test.

  He replied cautiously, “Well, I think Mr. Rather would rather see us defined as, er, objective brokers of information.” He added that he had worked in Republican politics for years, but, after deciding to pursue a journalism career, he’d registered as an independent.

  The young man wasn’t deterred. “No, it’s okay,” he said, lowering his voice to almost a whisper. “I’m one, too.” He explained that he worked in a research office down the hall.

  Scott was sympathetic. “So, you’re the only Republican in the research office—that must be tough.”

  “No, you don’t get it,” he said quickly. “I’m the only Republican in the building.”

  Scott told me that he was tempted to hug him. But he wasn’t sure who might be watching.

  Do you want a hundred more examples like this? I’m sure I could find them easily enough, but would it really make a difference? The fact is that the people who populate the majority of mainstream newsrooms don’t have all that much in common with the majority of the people they broadcast that news to.

  In a way, it’s not so shocking that they don’t understand us. It would almost be more shocking if they did. The bigger question is how newsrooms came to be this way in the first place. Why do so many journalists come from the same cities, same cultures, same colleges, and same sensibilities? And what has happened to all of the conservatives along the way?

  * * *

  Where Are the Conservative Media Heroes?

  There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a talk show host. There is nothing wrong with wanting to argue with passion. To persuade. To evangelize. We need more conservative/libertarian voices, not fewer. We need more people of deep conviction willing to speak up. But we also need more people willing to do the hard work of finding facts and connecting the dots; more people willing to cover that local school board or town council meeting on a random Tuesday night.

  Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes once spoke to a group of young conservatives at the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia. He told them that he was always amazed at how many young writers he encountered who graduated from college with the sense that they nearly had a “constitutional right to their own newspaper column.”

  Barnes relayed to them the story of longtime columnist Robert Novak. Novak never wrote a column that did not contain some piece of original information. Barnes noted that, long before Novak even became a columnist, he was a beat reporter in Nebraska, Illinois, and Indiana. When he finally got a break and went to Washington, D.C., he covered the House Ways and Means Committee—when it was closed to the press! Novak learned to develop sources, to make phone calls, to show up in person to find out what was really going on.

  That’s a good model to follow.

  Many successful conservative pundits first spent years as working reporters. Fred Barnes, for example, was at a newspaper in South Carolina. Cal Thomas spent a while as a correspondent for NBC News. Brit Hume spent years as a print reporter before eventually turning to television.

  Michael Goldfarb, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, told the Huffington Post that “a lot of conservatives, they want to be involved in journalism, but our heroes are all pundits. They want to be Rush Limbaugh. They want to be Bill Kristol. They wan
t to be Charles Krauthammer. The model is not Woodward and Bernstein on our side.”

  He’s right, and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to do opinion—those who do opinion best root their monologues in fact and logic anyway—we must have people willing to fill all of the roles in the media, not just the ones focused on opinion.

  * * *

  GET RICH NEVER

  It’s easy to complain about media bias, but it’s important to understand how difficult it can be to get one of the cherished jobs inside a major national news operation. Not because of any bias—on the application they don’t ask whom you voted for—but because of something that we conservatives hold dear: capitalism. Supply and demand. The free market.

  The truth is that launching a successful journalism career (one that takes you to the highest reaches of American media) is hard—and living the life of the working journalist can be even harder. At the beginning, the numbers are stacked against you. Schools are full of journalism students. After graduation, jobs are scarce. The professors might not tell students this when they first enroll, but very few of those who study journalism in college will ever end up in a job that actually requires reporting on the news.

  * * *

  The 99% Reports on the 1%

  Just 1 in 62 newspaper writers and editors are in the top 1 percent of American wage earners. Only 2.7 percent of those who majored in journalism make it into that income group.

  * * *

  Those who do graduate and land a job in journalism probably aren’t making a great salary—especially compared with their friends in New York who go to work on Wall Street. As fans of the free market, we can hardly complain about that. If there are few jobs and lots of people willing to do them, then starting salaries are low. The hours and quality of life are usually terrible as well. This is not a nine-to-five job with three weeks of vacation kind of deal. You might work weekends. Or overnight. Or start your morning at 4 A.M., every single miserable day.

  The early years of a media career aren’t exactly stable, or stationary. Young journalists are the first ones fired when the inevitable restructuring happens, and if you’re lucky enough to work for a national company, then you’ll likely be awarded with assignments in places not found on anyone’s bucket list. I started in radio when I was a teenager. By the time I was thirty I had worked in cities all over the country—from New Haven to Baltimore to Houston to Phoenix.

  I’ve talked to young people who’ve tried careers in journalism and didn’t last long. One took a job in corporate communications. Why? He’d been working weekends at a newspaper and hadn’t been to church in a year. Another young woman who’d been an assignment editor at a California TV station quit after a year because she didn’t think she could handle the job after the birth of her first child. Can’t really blame either of them.

  “We’re always wired. Never static. And we’re completely freed from slow-moving, obsolete corporate media restraints and biases against ‘non-traditional’ sources of news.”

  —Michelle Malkin, leading new media entrepreneur and founder of HotAir.com and Twitchy.com

  Think about it: if you are a talented college senior with aspirations of landing the kind of job that comes with a healthy salary potential—maybe an annual bonus or stock options—and a great work/life balance, would you really pick journalism as a career?

  I know I’m painting a grim picture here. Can a person pursue journalism only if they are a hard-living drinker who detests church and would rather look at a laptop than their own family? It’s not quite that bad, but, in all honesty, it’s not that far off. The “good people” are often chewed up and spit out by the machinery of the media before they even get their feet wet. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule—good people with good families do make it to the top—but they are just that: exceptions.

  INFORMATION > DISTRIBUTION

  The good news is that everything is changing. Fast. The days of having to choose between a journalism career and a good life are over—conservatives can finally have both. New media, and all of its forms of distribution, from the Web to cell phones to tablets, has created the single best opportunity for conservatives and libertarians to spread their message since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

  I’ve jumped headfirst into the revolution, first starting a news and information website called The Blaze (I named it that because the biblical Burning Bush consumes everything but the truth) and then launching GBTV, the first ever streaming television news and entertainment network.

  If you’ve never seen a show on GBTV, the best way I can describe it is that it’s television on the Internet, not Internet TV. Why the distinction? Well, because when most people hear “streaming network” they think of a guy in his basement with a webcam. I wanted to show people that it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, I spent an absolute fortune on it, but I believe that the way you present yourself to the online world is a major factor in how you will be regarded. A blogger writing opinion columns is not about to compete with the New York Times, and me setting up a few webcams with a white sheet for a backdrop is not about to scare CNN.

  Of course, that’s not to say that bloggers and webcams don’t have their place—they absolutely do. But if you want to compete in the major leagues of media then it’s going to take major-league resources. Both properties have their own newsrooms, studios, salespeople, and support staffs. I am treating them as mainstream media properties because that’s exactly who I’m going after. I have total confidence that both The Blaze and GBTV will show the world that digital doesn’t mean sacrificing first-class journalism and top-notch production values.

  * * *

  The Blaze Is Born

  The Blaze was created with the conviction that the truth has no agenda. We knew we wouldn’t be the first conservative news site—plenty of terrific, talented journalists and bloggers came before us (Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg come to mind), and there is a long history of thoughtful conservative magazines, from National Review and the American Spectator to Townhall and Newsmax. And I’ve already mentioned the tremendous reach and influence of the Drudge Report.

  Still, we felt there might just be room for a new site that would focus on more than just politics and government. It would go deep into all kinds of stories, from faith and religion to technology and science. We put our heads together and, in less than two months, we built TheBlaze.com.

  I’ll be honest: I wasn’t totally sure at first if people would like it. I believed we were filling a void, but as we got close to launch I started to worry that I was the only one seeing that void. We didn’t do focus groups, or test audiences. I was worried that people would think I was throwing up a website just to make money, when, in reality, I was going to take a bath on it.

  It turns out that we didn’t need to worry much. Scott Baker’s internal prediction of 2–4 million page views for the first month was about as accurate as my jump shot. TheBlaze.com did not do two million page views in the first month . . . it did two million page views the first day. And the traffic hasn’t stopped since. By the time TheBlaze.com reached the eighteen-month mark, we had topped one billion page views. Nearly 60 million people had been to the site at least once.

  The goal from the beginning was for The Blaze to be more than a website. More than anything, I wanted The Blaze to stand for something. A commitment to finding and telling stories that matter to an underserved audience; an audience that the mainstream media can never reach effectively, because they simply don’t understand them.

  * * *

  But while new media presents us with huge opportunities, it also has huge consequences if we fail. If conservatives use these platforms to simply do more opinion pieces or ideological attacks then we will lose the battle for this medium as well. The distribution platform is, after all, simply the way that this information reaches people; it’s still the information itself that matters. And that means we have to focus on real journalism, real investigations, r
eal sourcing and fact-checking and research. We don’t “win” simply because we can build slicker websites. We only win if we can literally change the way reporting is done; if we can take it from the hands of the coastal elites and deposit it back into the Heartland. That, by the way, is one reason that I moved part of my operations from New York City to Dallas recently. I knew that if I was going to talk the talk about bringing media back to the center of the country then I’d have to walk the walk.

  The GBTV Studios in Dallas, Texas

  IN WITH THE NEW, BUT KEEP THE OLD

  We are truly at a pivot point in the history of media—especially conservative media. And it’s because we are finally taking responsibility. We are not waiting for the establishment to change, or for entry-level journalism salaries to skyrocket so that more young conservatives will take those jobs. We’ve decided to tell the stories ourselves. Stories that matter. Truths that last.

  * * *

  Still the Gold Standard

  Roy Greenslade, a journalism professor at City University London and former editor of the Daily Mirror, recently asked his class a simple question: what is your primary news source? Here’s what happened:

  “Newspapers? No more than 20 hands went up. Radio? About the same. Television? Maybe 30. Internet? A forest of hands.

  Interestingly, many of the people taking the newspaper course—people hoping to get jobs on papers—admitted to not reading printed editions.