John J. Miller argues mainstream outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post—once trusted—now prioritize politics over truth, despite excelling in foreign and science reporting, while legacy dominance crumbles under algorithm-driven fragmentation. His Hillsdale College program’s conservative-leaning alumni thrive at WSJ and National Review, but he warns students’ social media dependency risks eroding discernment. The Twitter Files exposed government-tech collusion to silence dissent, proving the "mainstream press" myth dead; yet, new platforms offer hope amid lost cultural authority. Trump’s presidency laid bare media bias but also cemented its fixation on him, leaving unclear if post-Trump journalism will break free—or double down on polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
So I don't know if you've noticed, but Hillsdale College is having a real moment.
I mean, some of their people are absolutely terrific and are making a real dent in both the culture and our intellectual life.
One of the best people at Hillsdale, as far as I'm concerned, is John J. Miller, the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College.
And since we're talking about journalism today and the death of journalism, I wanted to bring him on and have him talk with some expertise.
He's also the executive director of the College Fix, which is a an absolutely great site exposing some of the insanity at the academies.
John, it's great to see you.
How are you doing?
I'm excellent.
How are you, Drew?
I am good.
I am good.
We have been, I spent a lot of time today talking about what I call the information crisis, which is the internet basically creating this place where people are just desperately trying to take control, take back control of the media.
I think the news media's corruption is almost entire.
I would like to know what you are seeing when you look at the media, the news media landscape today.
Well, it's never been worse.
Journalism has never been worse than it is right now.
And our most esteemed institutions, the great New York Times, the Washington Post, you name them all.
You can't trust them anymore.
You can't trust them, certainly on their politics.
They do have some virtues still.
I do like the New York Times for some of its foreign coverage and science coverage and so forth, but you really can't trust them for some of the most important things Americans need them for, read them for.
And I like to say journalism never has been worse, but I also say there's a kind of caveat there, which is it's never been better in the sense it's so diverse right now that you can go and seek out all kinds of alternative views.
There are great journalists at work today.
There are great news sites.
There are even great podcasts, Drew.
And, you know, if what we're doing right now is a form of journalism, it's certainly media.
And, you know, a generation ago, we didn't have these options.
You couldn't turn to them.
All you had was the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And, you know, they drove all the news coverage.
The TV stations looked to them for everything.
And they had more authority than they do now.
And one of the great accomplishments of the last generation is that they've lost their authority.
And we've done that through alternative media.
That's a really interesting and optimistic thing to say because obviously if it weren't true, they wouldn't be panicking so desperately and trying so desperately to shut us up.
You know, one of the questions, I get asked this question all the time, like, how do you find the facts?
When I started doing the show, which is not that long ago, it's like a little over seven years ago.
If I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, I knew the facts.
And then I could go other places to get different points of view.
Now it takes me at least three times as long with at least five times as much information.
What do you say to people when they want to know where do I go to get the truth?
That's a great question.
And the first point is you've got to be deliberate about it.
You can't just let the news come to you through your Twitter feed or your social media.
That's letting other people choose what is your news.
It's letting, first of all, your friends choose, but also the algorithms of these big tech companies are choosing for you.
And you can't do that.
I mean, you can certainly acquire news that way.
But if you want to be a good consumer of news, if you want to know what's going on in the world and have at least a partial grasp of what's happening in our country and the world, you've got to go search it out yourself.
And you've got to find those sites that are reliable, that you trust and so forth.
And I still go to the Wall Street Journal every day.
I regard its news coverage as really pretty good, not flawless, but nobody's news coverage is ever flawless.
It's really a pretty good, reliable source of information.
Also, I love its editorial pages for their insights and the reporting that goes on there.
So I start with that, but then I go to a number of other sites.
I do read the New York Times every day.
I find it valuable for certain reasons, partly to know what's on their minds and what they're thinking about.
But their coverage of Ukraine has been pretty good and sort of what's going on over there.
And their coverage of science and business, that can be pretty good as well.
But you've got to be deliberate.
You've got to know what you're going to and you've got to choose what you're going to rather than let other people choose it for you.
So you run this journalism department at what is now like probably the best college in the country.
I taught there for two weeks and I think I won the official John Miller restraining order never to come back.
But these kids who came in that I met, incredibly smart, incredibly active, lively thinkers.
What is the thing that you are looking?
What do they come in with that you want to get rid of?
And what do you want to give them before they leave?
Well, first of all, the students at Hillsdale College are terrific.
I love them.
They're great kids coming here.
It's like the opposite of garbage in, garbage out, right?
We get really good kids coming in.
And first and foremost, they're smart.
It's a pretty selective college.
It's getting harder and harder to get in.
Your test scores need to be good.
You need to be a really strong applicant.
And unfortunately, the admissions office has to turn away some really outstanding applicants.
But the kids that we get coming here, they're smart and they're hardworking, number one.
But, you know, smart and hardworking, there's a lot of kids who are like that.
What I really like about these Hillsdale College kids is they're decent people.
They're good people.
And, you know, I want my own kids to be around people like them.
And I think any parent should want that.
These are really fundamentally good people.
Look, they're 19, they're 20.
They do stupid, crazy things the way college students always do stupid, crazy things.
They make mistakes and so on, but they're really good, fundamentally good, solid people.
So number one, that's a great asset we have.
Now, now they do come here in terms of media consumption, if that's what you're asking.
I'm always asking us, where do you get your news?
And the answer is always, well, I read Twitter and I read Facebook or Instagram or whatever, TikTok.
I get that a lot too.
And fine, these are great tools.
I actually love social media.
What a terrific device this is for gathering information.
But that's not how you need more deliberate.
You need to choose yourself.
You need to learn in other ways rather than let it come at you by the choices of the people you follow and the companies and their algorithms and so forth.
So I've got to, you know, we don't teach this and we don't have courses on how to do Twitter, but it is something that everybody needs to learn.
You need to become a good discriminating consumer of news and information.
So I was stunned when I was there by how, I mean, we had some conversations in my class where I walked out afterwards and I thought, if I were at Yale, I would be up on like a Title IX fight or something.
Like I'd basically be out of a job where they were absolutely willing to talk about anything and discuss things and argue about things.
That was great.
You've placed a lot of people at very high level points.
I think Barton Swain was one of your guys, one of my favorite young writers coming up.
He's at the Vice for the Journal a lot.
He's not a Hillsdale grad, but he was a Polym Fellow, as you were.
And so he came and taught here at the college and has been a great ally.
Of course, he's just a terrific writer and thinker.
I mean, Barton's a destination writer.
I mean, I will read like anything he writes because he wrote it.
I don't care what the topic is.
But our alumni are really flourishing.
We have, well, at the Wall Street Journal editorial page with Barton, four of his colleagues come from Hillsdale College.
Jillian Melcher, who's a great foreign correspondent, kind of always running to the sound of gunfire, reporting from Ukraine and Hong Kong.
She's a Hillsdale grad.
Kate Odell is a great editorial writer there, often writing on the Navy and the need to rebuild our Navy and other topics.
We also have Nicole Alt and Mark Naida are both on the editorial page doing great work.
So they're there, but they're all over the place at National Review, at Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, and so on.
We have alumni everywhere.
So, you know, the places you mentioned are all conservative.
And one of the things that has been so distressing on the left is getting rid of basically blacklisting and destroying anybody in their ranks who doesn't toe the party line.
Barry Weiss Exposed00:05:42
Barry Weiss being the most obvious example.
I think she refused to hate Jews enough.
I can't remember why they threw her out of the New York Times.
But, you know, she's doing great journalistic work on these Twitter files and has been doing great work all around in just her interviews.
Is there any hope do you see for some kind of awakening or is it basically about building our own media, building a media to fight with them?
Well, I think we're building our own media.
That's actually what we're doing.
And that's the effect we're having.
I mean, Barry Weiss, this is an example of when I say the best journalism ever is going on right now.
It's Barry Weiss.
It's people like that.
I mean, they're on Substack.
They're all over the place.
I mean, some of the very best journalism is going on, you know, in the history of journalism is going on right now.
And it's because these independent truth-seeking journalists and voices have platforms that were not available to them in the past.
And they don't always have the biggest followings, although Barry Weiss seems to be doing okay.
But so these are suddenly available to us and combine that with the amazing technological resources we have.
I mean, when I got into journalism, if I needed to find the president's speech from a week ago, you know, it's phone calls.
It's like, would you please fax it to me, you know, with our high-text fax machines and then go waiting for the thing to kind of crawl out of the machine, you know?
And so, you know, now it's just a fingertip away.
I mean, our access to information is so good and so instantaneous that, you know, our factor at our fingertips.
So if you are a legitimately truth-seeking journalist, you can have this information quickly and you can convey it to readers immediately.
So that brings me to the Twitter files, which I just think, to me, the Twitter files is one of the most important stories I've ever seen in my life because of what it suggests about the general collusion of social media with not just government, but the government police powers.
When you look at this, I mean, and you look at the treatment of Elon Musk, who's just trying to let people talk, does that discourage you at all?
Do you think like, yes, yes, it's a wonderful thing that these voices are coming up, but the government is actively trying to shut them down.
Yes, distressing.
I mean, I used to be one of these people who would say, well, you know, Twitter wants to block you.
It is, you know, ban you or shadow ban you well.
It's a private company, right?
I mean, I sort of fell into that way of thinking and the company can do what it wants.
But when you see this kind of collusion, you see what it actually is, an abuse of free speech and the government interfering with First Amendment rights.
And so it does take on these principles.
And, you know, I'm the last person to say, you know, Google and so forth are public utility companies now and we need to regulate them in that way.
But my goodness, with this information that's coming out, you're seeing how the government is abusing its power to manipulate these companies to do its bidding in ways that just feel wrong.
And thank goodness, this information is coming out right now.
We're still learning about everything that's happening.
And it's one of these cases where I think the information, the knowledge we're going to have is just going to get worse and worse as we learn, you know, what was it, you know, just now it's the FBI, right?
And so forth.
And we're going to hear more and more about this.
And we may be in for some kind of reckoning.
And thank goodness we're now at least discussing it honestly.
Whereas in the past, this would all be covered up.
We'd never hear about it.
It would be rumor.
It'd be conspiracy theories.
Turns out it's true.
And we're learning about it because there are different voices in the media that did not exist a generation ago.
Well, let me ask you about this because this is something that disturbs me.
The mainstream press, as they call it, I don't know why they call it the mainstream press, but the corporate press, whatever you want to call it, is not covering this story.
I mean, if you're watching Fox News, you're finding out, if you're listening to the Daily Wire or reading the Daily Wire, you're finding out about it.
But if you read the New York Times, and I know people who actually think the New York Times is the news, you have no idea this is going on or think it's just some kind of strange thing.
Is that, I mean, is that going to stand, do you think?
I hope not.
But you're right.
The Times doesn't cover this.
They don't, you know, COVID, the kinds of COVID coverage you see, pandemic coverage you see is different depending on where you look.
I mean, these are almost alternate realities.
And I do think, Drew, we've got to stop using the term mainstream media.
There was a time when that was a useful phrase.
It did capture something.
Our media was at least, you know, it was center left maybe, but it was kind of a mainstreamy kind of kind of phenomenon.
It is not that anymore.
And I find myself using that term all the time, just out of habit.
I've used it my whole life.
But really, there is no mainstream media anymore.
We're fractured.
And that has both challenges and opportunities.
The opportunities is that voices that didn't have audiences before had trouble connecting with their audience, now they have them.
They have them through podcasts.
They have them through Substack.
They have them through social media accounts.
They have them through websites.
You can connect and tell the truth and the truth will come out in ways it never could before.
But at the same time, we have lost authoritative voices in the culture.
And that has its own kind of consequence.
I've only got a minute, so you got to keep this quick.
But did Trump expose the media or did he change them or both?
And in other words, what I'm asking is, will things get better after Trump is off the scene or is this a permanent?
Yeah, that's a great question.
Social Media Truths & Consequences00:01:11
I mean, I do think it's both.
The media became so Trump obsessed.
I mean, Trump became their North Star.
And that's true for the ultra-mAGA crowd.
It's true for the Trump-deranged crowd.
I mean, it's like everything is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
They can't stop talking about this guy.
On the one hand, on the other hand, he called him out pretty effectively.
I mean, we now have this term fake news.
I mean, what a simple term that is.
But boy, does it capture an awful lot.
And it's a great term we have.
And we wouldn't have without him.
You could say those words, but it wouldn't have the same kind of resonance.
So he exposed a lot of the lies and he was a subject to a lot of false accusations.
But we'll see what happens next.
Yeah.
All right, John J. Miller from Hillsdale, the director of the Dow Journalism Program.
A great program from what I saw of it.
Also, I should mention that you're also a terrific writer, especially on horror writers and classic genre writers.
He has a great book called Reading Around Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas.