Campus ink tanks
Conservatives make their voices heard with a rising tide of hard-hitting student newspapers.
By John Johnson, Times Staff Writer
Wingate, N.C. - More than a dozen earnest college students gathered in the marshy meadowland of rural North Carolina recently to plot the overthrow of campus liberalism.
Their weapon of choice? The newspaper.
"People complain about the media," said Joshua Mercer, the pink-cheeked director of the seminar held at the Jesse Helms Center in the heart of chicken-growing country. "Our philosophy is, 'Be the media.' "
In an eight-hour session that bore little resemblance to a traditional journalism class, the students were taught how to start their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals. And how to pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student government.
By the end of the day, the student journalists were fired up for battle - determined not only to change the tenor of notoriously liberal campus dialogues, but also, in the long run, to alter the basic makeup of the nation's professional news outlets.
"What do you want professors to feel when you call them up?" asked Owen Rounds, a former speechwriter for Rudolph Giuliani.
"Threatened," replied Duncan Wilson, a tousle-haired 19-year-old from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
In the wake of Sept. 11 and the war on Iraq, seminars such as this one are brimming with recruits to the battle for the hearts and minds of America's college students. There are now more than 80 right-leaning newspapers and magazines circulating on campuses from Stanford to Yale. That's the most ever, and 50% more than just two years ago.
"This year alone we've had 35 inquiries for starting new papers," said Brian Auchterlonie, executive director of the Collegiate Network, which trains conservative journalists. "That's double what we usually have."
The reason, the students say, is a mad-as-hell feeling among campus conservatives that they are the only ones in academia who seemed to notice that the world changed after the Sept. 11 attacks on America. They say they have watched aghast as left-leaning professors and student leaders blamed America for the attacks. So now they're starting their own guerrilla publications, often styled as unbridled opinion journals, to drum up support on campus for President Bush and the Iraq war.
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