Counterrevolution: Thirty Years of the Conservative Press

    In the spring of 1997, I was on the phone with Tucker Carlson when he asked me about Stephen Glass. Glass had written an explosive article in The New Republic. Called “Spring Breakdown,” it claimed that young men at the conservative conference CPAC were involved in drugs, drinking, and sexual assault. 

    Tucker and I had been discussing something totally different when he suddenly asked me about the Glass piece. I told him I had been at CPAC and not seen anything like what Glass described. I was a journalist for a magazine called Insight and certainly would have reported seeing something like that. 

    As it turned out, of course, the Glass piece was total fiction. Glass had famously made up the entire thing, as he had most of his other articles for The New Republic. 

    I was thinking about Glass while contemplating my thirty years writing for different magazines, websites and platforms for the conservative media. It’s astonishing how much has changed. Whereas a piece like “Spring Breakdown” could cause an electric current of fear to run through Washington and indeed the country, the same piece today would be savaged, mocked, and destroyed within minutes. It’s a new digital world. We have total freedom. We can body check the legacy media in seconds and write our own stories.

    Conservative media has been engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the left for so long that sometimes we forget to pull the lens back and fully appreciate how much we have leveled the playing field. Thirty years ago, if a conservative got destroyed in the media, the only recourse was to submit a letter to the editor of the local Stasi press outlet, where it would be ignored or edited and buried in the paper a week later. Now conservative journalists can actually dismantle lies and even collapse things like a book launch by a major publisher for leftist journalists. 

    Part of what got me thinking about this was reading an advanced copy of the great new book by Victor Davis Hanson, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement. The book doesn’t come out for a month, and I will have a fuller review then, but in terms of its overall message and how it diagnoses the media, it is a bull’s-eye. Hanson argues that Trump has been the most effective counterforce to the slow crawl of “progressive” politics over the last century – and that kneecapping the media was a crucial part of that. Hanson:

Aside from the Democrats, perhaps the strongest and most vitriolic of all the various anti-Trump entities was the proverbial mainstream, or legacy, media, the headwaters of Trump derangement syndrome, into which all others tapped. The modern media had always been proudly left of center. But after Trump appeared, it saw no need to hide its bias. Indeed, it felt not exhibiting bias was somehow poor journalism. This establishment media could be understood as a pyramid, in which rank was defined not by readership, audience rating, profitability, or market share but rather by current prestige and the legacy of prior journalistic glory days. At the top of the hierarchy were longtime prestigious print media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, along with magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker and online publications like Politico, plus the wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters. The media elite liked to be referred to as “authoritative” or “serious people,” staffing the “paper of record.” But in their hatred of Trump, they willingly sacrificed those hard-won epithets on the altar of the premise that Trump was a unique danger to the country. Many of their younger reporters were trained neither in traditional journalistic methods nor in the profession’s ethics but had only absorbed a woke zeal. Indeed, sometimes even beneficiaries of the biased media in Democratic administrations despised their obsequious journalistic clients. 

    Hanson also takes on the “Never Trump” media lead by Republicans who “sought to reclaim their former stature and careers by being showcased as principled Republicans who put devotion to the country over party loyalty. But most of their former conservative constituents over a decade had concluded that they were embittered grifters who were gladly used, and handsomely paid, by the Left to attack Trump from his own supposed right flank. A few Never Trumpers, such as once-prominent conservative Bill Kristol, cofounder of The Bulwark, soon ceased the pretense that they were still conservatives at all. He matched or even exceeded Democrats’ scorn of Trump and endorsed most of Trump’s successive Democratic and Independent opponents. Finally, Kristol dropped all pretense of being a conservative and endorsed the candidacy of radical socialist Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City mayoral race.”

    Bill Kristol was the editor of The Weekly Standard in 1997, when “Spring Breakdown” was published and Stephen Glass was still considered honest. One of Kristol’s writers was Tucker Carlson. How differently both men have turned out, with Kristol going loony left and Carlson going conspiracy far-right. At the time, however, both were sane, and the Weekly Standard was a place where journalists like myself could go. I had written for places like The Washington Post and The New York Times, but their activism, hostile reporting about conservatives, and censorship of my editorials and essays made me walk away. As Whittaker Chambers put it, I thought I was leaving the winning side for the losing side. Socialism would eventually win. 

    It didn’t – at least so far. We’re a long way from the days when Stephen Glass could strike fear into the hearts of conservatives and dominate the news cycle. 

    An example: On September 14, 2019, brilliant journalist Mollie Hemingway obtained an early copy of the book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, which was written by New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin and scheduled to be published on the following Tuesday, September 17. In obtaining an early copy of the book, Hemingway was able to preemptively firebomb a bogus story that was being sold by two of the book’s authors. 

    A Times story that had been posted on September 14 and excerpted from the book claimed that in the early 1980s a woman at Yale University had been the victim of a sexual assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh had become a Supreme Court Justice in October 2018. The problem was that the woman herself said she had no memory of the alleged incident. In reporting the story, Kelly and Pogrebin, the authors of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, had left out this fact. 

    The two women were caught because Hemingway’s coverage managed to ruin Pogrebin and Kelly’s book several days before it was even published. Pogrebin and Kelly were sandblasted on social media by everyone across the political and journalistic spectrum from The View to Joe Scarborough to Fox News. They became a joke. This would not have been possible thirty years ago.

    In a recent book, The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History, Ashley Rindsberg proves that reporters for the New York Times have been actively manipulating stories for over a hundred years. They could have done it again in the fall of 2019 had Hemingway not prevented the paper from using lies and personal manipulation to destroy Kavanaugh. 

    Before the rise of the internet and conservative media, the Times was injecting itself into history with impunity and great success, from the rise of communism in Russia to the glorification of Fidel Castro and the battlefields of Vietnam. Winked author Rindsberg lays out in rich detail how the “reporters” for the Times have always injected themselves into political movements to ensure a certain outcome. The most famous is Walter Duranty, who was the Times‘s Moscow correspondent in the 1930s and became an apologist for Stalin. Journalist Joseph Alsop once called Duranty, who denied that there was any famine in Russia, a “fashionable prostitute” for the Bolsheviks. To British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” Duranty, whose reporting – based, notes Rindsberg, on “dubious, vague, and unnamed sources” – affected American foreign policy, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his exclusive interviews with Stalin. His lies affected American foreign policy and aimed to discredit journalists like Gareth Jones who told the truth about Stalin’s crimes. When confronted about his role in helping Stalin perpetuate a famine that cost millions of lives, Duranty actually said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

    Then there were David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, two American journalists covering Vietnam in the 1960s. Rindsberg recalls how Halberstam and Sheehan would file stories that had no sources, pieces that were highly tendentious and intended to undermine the Diem government of South Vietnam, which was fighting a war against the communist north. 

    Filing stories that had no named sources but rather lies based on communist spies and plenty of emotional manipulation to incite the people, Halberstam and Sheehan actively took the side against America. Rindsberg: “The involvement of Halberstam and Sheehan in the coup d’etat [against Diem] was not just direct – it was explicit. The journalists themselves, if not boasting, spoke confidently about their role in overthrowing the Diem government in their later articles and books. The two (especially Halberstam) had trained their sights on the Diem government, which they regarded as brutal and authoritarian, and went to great, and ultimately very effective, lengths to weaken the regime.”

    The Education of Brett Kavanaugh was an attempt by Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, the Halberstam and Sheehan of the modern #MeToo New York Times, to stage their own coup against an American institution, the Supreme Court. Their book was the final part of a 16-month effort to try and prevent Kavanaugh from becoming a Supreme Court Justice, and to place a cloud over his head if he somehow managed to make it through. The main weapon was Christine Blasey Ford, a leftist California professor who, working with an opposition researcher, leveled a last-minute charge of sexual assault against Kavanaugh. When that didn’t work, the Times tried the Yale assault story. When that began to teeter, they dragged out pulp tales about high school gang rapes and drugged women. These stories of Kavanaugh as a criminal mastermind made it into the Times. It was no different than Duranty.

    As Mollie Hemingway reported, Robin Pogrebin actually told one of Kavanaugh’s former classmates at Yale what to say. Karen Yarasavage recalled that Pogrebin had called her up and posed as an old Yale friend, failing to note that the purpose of the call was to write a hit piece on Kavanaugh. Pogrebin tried to get Yarasavage to go on record saying that a classmate supposedly assaulted by Kavanaugh “became a different person, a lot more liberal.” Yarasavage said no: “I have no idea if that is true, truly speculation. I told [Pogrebin] I don’t want to be included at all in any way….I don’t want to read any of the articles because everything is taken apart and put together to sensationalize and may not even read true in the end.”

    Mollie Hemingway, the antipode of Stephen Glass, and the rest of the honest conservative media have helped end what has been a century of victories shaping history and destroying lives by the leftist Times and the rest of the Stasi media. The battle continues, but reading Hanson’s book and reflecting on my three decades doing this, I felt a lot of pride and gratitude at the progress we have made and the quality journalism we have (mostly) produced. “Spring Breakdown” has broken down.

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