Matthew Sheffield's blog

Part of the reason that liberal bias in the elite media exists is that not enough conservatives and libertarians decide to get involved in journalism, especially straight news reporting.

One of the best organizations on the right trying to combat this is the Phillips Foundation which has a program that pays generous amounts of money to encourage people to get involved in producing high-quality journalism that can really make a difference.

If the idea of this appeals to you, consider applying for the 2009 Phillips fellowships. Full-time fellowships pay out $50-75,000 to successful applicants. Part-time ones pay $25,000. 

The program is open to anyone with 10 years or less of professional journalistic experience. Not interested yourself? Forward this post to someone who you think might be.

There is a lot of great  potential that we on the right have. It's about time we started using it.

In 2008, the Foundation awarded eight fellowships. For your reference they are as follows:

Full-time

• David Donadio for “The Free Press in the Free Market: A Study of How the Internet is Transforming the Newspaper Business;”
• Travis Kavulla for “Africa’s New Christianity and the Future of American Influence;”
• Emily Krone for “Unchartered Territory: Can Entrepreneurial Charter Schools Achieve the Scale and Sustain the Quality to Transform the American Public School System?;”
• Lygia Navarro for “Civil Society and Democracy in Latin America.”

Part-time

• Cheryl Chumley for “National Heritage Areas: A Blot against Property Rights or a Boon for the Nation?;”
• Matthew Continetti for “The Single Society: The Social Transformation Changing American Business, Politics and Culture;”
• J. Peter Freire for “The University Shakedown: How Universities Take Donations but Refuse Input from Donors Based on the Myth of Academic Freedom;”
• Jonathan Last for “The Fertility Rate and America’s Future.”

John Ensign said a lot yesterday in a very small number of words:

The Senate Republicans' top fundraiser Thursday said he is telling colleagues this is a bad year for members of his party to be up for election.

"I'm telling them if you have an 'R' in front of your name, you better run scared," said Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). [...]

Mr. Ensign dismissed reports that contributions to the Republicans by disgruntled small donors are down this year. He maintained the party's contributor base is intact. The Republican Party long has boasted that it is the party of small donors while the Democratic Party has had to rely far more on wealthy contributors to finance election campaigns.

He said the Republican Party never suffered a loss in small donors, only a shrinkage in the net amount of money raised - a decline that he said was not the result of small donors being disgusted with excessive Republican spending in Congress but of the party having been mailing "bad" lists that had driven up fundraising costs. That problem has been eliminated, he said.

Well I for one am resting a lot easier now.

Ensign's strange remarks (quoted in the Washington Times above) speak volumes about what's wrong with the right. Ironically, it is not that we are behind technologically but rather that we've become obsessed with it.

That may seem a little off-kilter so let me explain.

In the world of conservative non-profits and Republican campaigns the wrong type of thinking has caught hold, a type of thought that says with enough voter demographic databases and precisely targeted email lists, we can do anything. This school of thought has a close relative which argues that if we just build blogs, create videos, and sync our Twitter and Facebook accounts enough, we'll win the public back to our side.

Unfortunately, politics doesn't work that way. Keeping up with the technological Joneses is actually the bare minimum of what the right should be doing. It takes little strategic vision to insist upon high-technology web sites, well-produced video, or precise mailing lists. All of these things are good things. What we desperately need more of is a return to the public square on the part of the right.

Instead of continually trying to refine Reagan-era political strategy, we ought instead to be creating post-Reagan conservatism, one that rejects the small-bore politics of photo-ops, earmarks (pro and con), and cowering before the press in favor of a 21st century conservatism that realizes politics is done less in the halls of Congress and more in the television and computer screens of the home. A conservatism that isn't silent on technology, the environment, and the global economy.

And how about a conservatism that actually tries to explain itself in language that makes sense to the average person?

That last point is especially critical. Most people don't really care at all about policy. Nor should they. What they do want is to hear today's issues addressed in a reasonable manner by someone who loves the country and its people. With that in place, victory follows. Even with a "bad" mailing list.

Matthew Sheffield is the creator of NewsBusters and executive producer of the fake news show "NewsBusted."

Although today his book is being touted by left-wing reporters and pundits, his initial plans for the project show former White House press secretary Scott McClellan intended to take a much different approach, one that was more sympathetic to President Bush but also quite hard on the "liberal elites" of the Washington press corps and their "hostility" toward the administration.

Reading through McClellan's original book proposal, obtained by Politico.com, it is clear that before his editor Peter Osnos took the book on a sharp leftward turn, McClellan wanted to turn the tables on foes in the press gallery including far-left columnist Helen Thomas and NBC correspondent David Gregory.

"I came to know and respect those who were assigned to the White House beat. They are solid professionals, but rarely scrutinized or put under the microscope. I will take a look at notable personalities in the White House Briefing Room, including David Gregory and Helen Thomas. I anticipate an entire chapter about the former," McClellan writes in his proposal.

According to McClellan, America's elite journalists have a dramatic problem with political diversity which in turn leads them to skew the political debate in a leftward direction. The media are in a "constant state of denial" when it comes to admitting this.

I will look at what is behind the media hostility toward the President and his Administration, and how much of it is rooted in a liberal bias.

The public holds the national media in low esteem. I think there are several reasons why, and I intend to write about them in some detail while discussing ways the media could improve their image. It is more than just the perceived arrogance, cynicism, gotcha-journalism, and lack of accountability. The establishment media does not tend to reflect Main Street America, or spend enough time focusing on the issues that matter most to the general public, and too often sacrifice substance for process. They tend to reflect the liberal elites of New York and Washington that are part of the social circles in which they run, and it shows in their reporting. Yet, they live in a constant state of denial when it comes to acknowledging such an obvious fact.

Fairness is defined by the establishment media within the left-of-center boundaries they set. They defend their reporting as fair because both sides are covered. But, how fair can it be when it is within the context of the liberal slant of the reporting? And, while the reporting of the establishment media may be based on true statements and facts, is it an accurate picture of what is really happening?

The fact that McClellan's revised, Bush-bashing book is being so heavily promoted by the top media outlets is a testament to the veracity of McClellan's original thesis. It is also a validation of one of the right's biggest critiques of the Bush Administration--its loyalty fetish. Scott McClellan should never have been appointed to his position. He only obtained it because of his personal connections, not through his merit or affinity for conservative principles. That he turned on Bush is not exactly surprising.

Full text of McClellan proposal.