It’s no secret that the woke in our society have a chokehold on institutions of higher education. Colleges and universities have long been petri dishes for destructive and regressive leftist ideals. But unless you have kids in school, it can be pretty hard to tell just how bad things have gotten. Here, I would like to share my experience as a conservative student trying to make it in a field dominated by the left.
I am a student at Iowa State’s Greenlee School of Journalism, where the ones teaching the next generation of professional journalists reside. During my time at the school, I have had good professors and bad professors, just as anyone would. While the faculty at Iowa State may be more subtle about their views compared to many of the coastal schools, the push for leftism is alive and well.
The big push the school likes to emphasize is to remain non-biased, be objective and only pursue facts. However, the examples they use for publications that practice good, unbiased fact-finding journalism are publications like The New York Times, which regularly lies about conservatives and those it brands as right-wing. Most recently, it perpetuated the lie that Elon Musk hailed Hitler at a rally following the inauguration of President Trump to his second term of office. Truly a beacon of integrity in journalism.
One professor even stated in class that it is the duty of the journalist to decide for the public what is and isn’t important for them to know, as “We set the narrative for the rest of society.” That same professor went on that same semester to attack Tucker Carlson over his coverage of the Ukraine war, calling it pro-Putin and a danger to the dialogue in our country.
A professor teaching ethics in journalism went on to smear Representative Elise Stefanik for her questioning of Yale and Harvard presidents after their universities held massive riots in the wake of the October 7th attack against Israel, where 1,200 Israeli civilians were butchered by Hamas. This professor stated that Rep. Stefanik’s questioning of whether anti-Semitism was tolerated at Harvard and Yale demonstrated that she failed to understand the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The school paper of the university, The Iowa State Daily, despite its spoken adherence to the ideas of unbiased news coverage, doesn’t seem to play nice with stories that may break the liberal echo chamber. The publication forces its writers to use the AP style for all of their writing, as this is the style most mainstream liberal publications use. However, this is inherently biased not only against conservatives and the language we use but also the language of everyday Americans. An article I had written covering the security of Iowa elections, following a report from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office confirming that illegal aliens had voted in the presidential election, was barred from publication. The reason given was that I used unsafe and hateful language in referring to illegal aliens as “illegal.”
This single unpublished article was enough for me to be barred from covering state or federal politics entirely, as I had an inherent bias and did not fit the publication practices of the paper. Since having works published is an important part of students building their portfolios for finding work after school, I was effectively banned from using a school resource for having a different opinion than the people editing my work. My editor would go on to write a piece attacking North Korean defector Yeonmi Park as being inconsistent and exaggerating her experience in a communist dictatorship. But since Yeonmi is seen as right-wing and election security is a right-wing issue, this behavior is considered unbiased.
The College of Journalism even promotes DEI and woke policies to its students in the common room for students. A large bookshelf with many books available to students contains 100% leftist works, with titles like Through the Lens of Whiteness, Diversity at College, Transgender Inclusion, Gender, Race, and Class in Media, and the holy doctrine of the Church of Woke, White Fragility. All are available on demand. However, there isn’t a single book by a conservative author to be seen. An easy inclusion could be Unfreedom of the Press by Mark Levin, if they want to stick with books that focus on media and journalism. But not even a single book by anyone right of Chairman Mao.
Journalism is an industry overrun by the woke left, and that starts in the schools that churn out new journalists. This is a cancer that we need to remove as a society, or else we will be doomed to fight this culture war forever.
