Under the Right's Wing
Toch, Thomas
Under the Right's Wing How the conservative press is recruiting and training its own BY THOMAS TOCH THE DARTMOUTH REVIEW, THE RANCOROUS, ultra-conservative Ivy League student newspaper, has...
...Last year, The Duke Review ran a head - line, “Being Queer for Credit...
...Past editors of the papers include many of the rising stars at the think tanks, journals, and other institutions that shape the right-of-center agenda inside the Beltway...
...The Network also brokers valuable stepping-stone jobs for its editors...
...The foundation also bankrolls the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and the National Association of Scholm, an organization of conservative college professors...
...Their mainstream rivals frequently have larger press runs and publish more often, usually daily or weekly...
...But while the campus papers play a valuable role as a forum for conservative opinions, their methods are at times dubious...
...NJC interns spend six weeks workmg with the center’s staff and another six working with writers and editors at conservative mkdia like Humn Events and Natiml Empowemzent Tekvipon...
...The publications are at times thoughtful, at times witty...
...Back in 1988,"60 minutes" traveled to the Hanover, N.H., campus to report on the paper's racially tinged confrontation with an African American professor over the quality of his teaching methods-an incident that led to the university’s suspension of three Reuiew editors for invasion of privacy and disorderly conduct...
...the Virginia Advocate’s Rich Lowry, the national political writer at the National Review...
...It also sponsors two, expenses-paid editors’ conferences a year...
...The Network‘s financial largesse is crucial...
...maintains e-mail and 800-number phone links to the Network‘s staff...
...They are hard to ignore...
...the Sarah Scde Foundation, a major benefactor of right-wing thd tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation...
...The Doctor of Democracy has employed all of his considerable talent on loan from God to create his greatest work of insight yet,” gushed the University of North Carolina’s Carolina Review about Rush Limbaugh‘s latest right-wing screed, See, I Told You So...
...In addition to helping conservative journalists establish a presence on campus, the Collegiate Network plugs them into the conservative advocacy industry...
...It has funded year-long internships at The New Republic and currently pays for a staffer at The Weekly IStandmd Shalit, author of a widely debated piece on r a d hmng at The Washingtun Post, landed at The New Republic on a Network internship after her stint as editor of the Princetun Sentinel...
...Says James Piereson, Olin’s executive director, of the foundation’s campus newspaper crusade: ‘We’re fighting a war of ideas...
...Indeed, the more confrontational articles provoke outrage...
...But while mainstream student papers outnumber their conservative counterparts, the financial muscle behind the right’s campus crusade belies the image of conservative student scribes as poor underdogs...
...Like the Dartmouth Reuiew, the new papers wage a relentless battle against speech codes, affirmative action, black studies, women’s studies, gay rights, ethnic housing, and the “anti-conservative” bent of established campus papers...
...Under the Right's Wing How the conservative press is recruiting and training its own BY THOMAS TOCH THE DARTMOUTH REVIEW, THE RANCOROUS, ultra-conservative Ivy League student newspaper, has been grabbing headlines for a long time...
...Rather, the papers are a presence on their campuses because they challenge the prevailing Zeitgeist on a range of emotional issues...
...Conservatives may grouse about the hurdles they face in getting their perspectives heard in the media...
...Contrary to conventional wisdom, the papers’ editors aren’t all WASPy guys in wingtips...
...the Michigan Review’s Jonathan J. Miller, vice president of the Center for Equal Opportunity...
...Many staffers at conservative campus publications also participate in expenses-paid internships sponsored by the National Journalism Center, an affiliate of the Education and Research Institute, a right-wing organization headed by M. Stanton Evans...
...Recent presenters include Major Garrett, the Washington Times political correspondent, and Kevin Pritchett, the former Damzoath Review editor and Wall Street Journal editorial page staffer who is now an aide to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott...
...Jenny Choo, a past editor of the Redwood Reuiew at the University of California-Santa C m , was branded a “banana”-yellow on the outside, white in the middle-by fellow Asian American students after she wrote an editorial urging the university to cut back its attempts to promote multicultudsm in the face of a budget crunch...
...Among them are the Vassar SpectatoA Marc Thiessen, now Jesse Helms’s press spokesman at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...And the papers are not merely carrying the right’s banner into campus debates...
...The Network publishes a 92-page guide, “Start the Presses!,” offering publishing novices advice on topics ranging from news gathering to ad sales...
...Much like radio “shock jocks,” the antagonistic tone of some of the papers seems aimed more at escalating the volume than the quality of the debate...
...Predictably, their heroes are Newt Gingrich, Charles Murray, Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan, and, of course, DSouza...
...The bulk of foundation donations are funneled through conservative tax-exempt organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., a non-profit conservative advocacy group located outside Wilniington, Delaware...
...Last winter, the Carolana Review’s depiction of a Jewish candidate for student body president with horns and a trident (a common characterization of Jews by anti-Semites) led to an outcry from Jewish faculty members and a public rebuke by the university’s chancellor...
...and provides a steady flow of story ideas...
...Its latest offering: a site on the World Wide Web, where a number of its member papers are available electronically...
...Theissen got hs first break, an internship in the Reagan White House, through the Network as a junior at Vmar...
...No less important to the movement is the Leadership Institute, a tax-exempt conservative group headed by Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan aide and leader of the College Republicans during the 1960s...
...In other instances the papers engage in unwitting self-parody...
...Largely with funds garnered from direct mail efforts (Blackwell worked for conservative direct-mail guru &chard Viguerie in the 1970s), the Institute provides grants to start conservative student papers and trains the papers’ staffs through the “student publications schools” it runs in Washington and around the nation...
...Endowed by a fmarms fortune, Olin spends about $200,000 a year in support of conservative campus journalism as part of its extensive funding of conservative causes...
...The single largest fimder is the New York-based John M. Olin Foundation...
...Conservative organizations have secured their voice on campus by offering students a moveable feast of money, contacts, and programs...
...Other notable backers include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a fimder of David Brock‘s attacks on Anita Hill (“a little bit nutty and little bit slutty...
...the Wesleyan Review’s Matthew Rees, a staff writer at The Week4 Standard...
...Whatever the excesses of the conservatives’ campus crusade, no one can argue that the right isn’t getting a substantial remrn on its investment...
...and the University of Iowa’s Campus Review columnist David Mastio, now an editorial writer and op-ed page editor at USA Eday At 29, Theissen is the oldest of the group...
...The inaugural issue of the four-year-old Carolina Review suggested that President Clinton’s “frequent policy shifts [are] caused by variations in Hillary’s menstrual cycle...
...Newsa and World Report, is writing a book about the privatization of schools...
...So did Rea, who worked with T i W s conservative pundit Fred Barnes after editing the Review at Wesleyan University in Connecticut...
...and the Adolph Coors Foundation...
...What’s received less public attention is that conservative organizations have spent millions of dollars in recent years cloning the Dartmouth paper at over 100 top-ranked colleges and universities...
...surveys reveal that they aren’t...
...But if the swelling ranks of influential alumni of the student newspaper network are a measure, conservatives don’t need to be pitied so much as emulated...
...Participants in the two-day sessions get nuts-and-bolts advice on starting conservative student publications, including lectures on “fighting the campus left...
...Many of the minority editors pay a price for their conservative allegiances...
...Most of the new conservative papers publish monthly, are free, and are distributed alongside ‘‘official” student publications in dorm lobbies, student unions, libraries, and other common areas...
...Often, backlash against the papers takes the form of guerrilla warfare...
...With over $300,000 a year from Oh, Scaife, and other foundations, the Collegiate Network works to launch new publications and strengthen existing ones...
...the Nodnvestern Revim’s Lynne Munson, recently Lynne Cheney’s top staffer at the American Enterprise Institute and now in the policy ofice of the Dole campaign...
...After Right Reason, a new conservative publication at Notre Dame, ran editorials last spring backing the university’s refusal to recognize a student gay and lesbian group, the group’s members swiped 2,000 copies of the paper, then went on local television news to defend the heist...
...THOMAS TOCH, a senior editor at U.S...
...Bernadette Malone, the 1993-1994 editor of the B@ghamton Review at the State University of New York at Binghamton, interned through the Center last year with conservative columnist and talk-show host Robert Novak...
...Driving the conservative student newspaper movement are some of the nation’s biggest right-leaning foundations...
...The Duke Review recently ran a funny dig at “Mastercard Marxists” on the university’s faculty...
...But the organization’s contributions go beyond the purely financial...
...It runs a summer lecture program in Washington where several dozen editors receive the conservative gospel from-and rub shoulders with-the likes of Bennett, Bork, Cheney, William Knstol, and other big names on the Right...
...Headed by former Reagan White House policy guru T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., the IS1 runs the Collegiate Network, an alliance of 56 conservative campus papers...
...It’s a war, conservatives contend, that pits the conservative David against the liberal Goliath...
...We want to reach the nation’s future leaders...
...the Princeton Sentinels Ruth Shalit, an associate editor for The New Republic...
...Women edit about a dozen of the publications, and there are a smattering of African American editors, including the recent opinion editor of the three-year-old Williams Free Press...
...Conservative organizations have secured their voice on campus by offering students a moveable feast of money, contacts, and programs...
...Member papers receive grants as large as $3,000 a year, and with the low cost of desktop publishing, the cash goes a long way...
...And rightwing commentators William Bennett (the John M. O h fellow at the Heritage Foundation), Robert Bork, and David Brock have written books under Olin grants, as has Dinesh D’Souza, the best-selhg culture critic who helped launch the Daitmozith Reuiew a decade ago...
...They are turning out a new generation of conservative thinkers and writers who are talung up high-profile posts in conservative public policy circles...
...But the conservative papers attract readers nonetheless-not because today’s students are more conservative...
...John Fund of The Wall StreetJ~mnutse ditorial page is another notable NJC alumnus...
...In another story, it disparaged a faculty member as a “penis-envying . . . ethnic pimp...
...Malone is now a full-time Novak staffer...
Vol. 28 • November 1996 • No. 11
