A call to the right

Students who participate in the programs say networking and the opportunity to learn how to break into journalism – including through courses in print and broadcast media, and even foreign reporting – are most valuable.

"It's a big leap from being interested to actually knowing how to get started or how to get a foot in the door," says recent Princeton grad Xiaochin Yan, who has been helped by The Collegiate Network, which offers support to conservative college journalists. "The CN's numerous contacts, conferences, speakers, and visits make that leap a bit easier and show that it is possible to make a difference and give you more of an incentive/opportunity to go for it."

Ms. Yan was publisher of a conservative newspaper on campus. She had planned to go to law school when she graduated this past spring, but instead she's bound for Hong Kong to work as an intern at the Asian Wall Street Journal, thanks in part to financial help from the Collegiate Network.

She resists the idea that she is on a crusade to correct a bias in the media. "I'm not going out there to fix a liberal bias with my conservative views. I'm going out there to do the best job I can."

That's also the goal of Adam Housley, a correspondent with Fox News. He won't talk about his political leanings, but the former baseball player will discuss the course in broadcast journalism he took in 1997 from a group called the Leadership Institute. "I learned more there in three days than I did in my journalism classes [in college]," he says. "They never pushed an ideology, they pushed fairness. That's what Fox pushes. I was impressed by that."

If conservatives agree that more of their ranks in the media would reduce bias, they don't always agree that training can achieve that. Some say it depends on where people are being placed. Max Boot, op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal, says it's one thing "if they are training people to infiltrate The New York Times. But if they are training them to go to the National Review, I don't think there's a point to that."

Still, right-leaning outlets do offer more opportunities for conservatives who are thinking about journalism. Tucker Carlson, a cohost on CNN's "Crossfire," remembers how difficult it was to get a job at a mainstream outlet in the late '80s. Instead, he broke into the profession by writing for the many magazines conservatives published then.

And Malone, the would-be marine, says it's fine to recruit young people, "but they have to have places to go." "You might not get into the living rooms of average Americans who want to be swayed one way or another," she says, "but the people who are out there looking for it, like I was when I was 18, are relieved when they stumble upon this journalistic community, even if it's an insular one."

The Leadership Institute nurtured her interest in journalism. She realized that, as with the military, the profession would provide her with a salary she could live on and the ability to enact her conservative principles. "And," she jokes, "I wouldn't have to do any pull-ups."

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