Monday, February 14
Even when they're the majority, they're still losers.
Attention Young Liberals

College campuses are widely viewed as liberal bastions, with towns such as Berkeley, Cambridge and Madison used as shorthand for left-wing communities of faculty and students.
So why is a Washington think tank funneling money to universities to encourage liberal journalism? Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?
"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world."
"We're being outhustled," says Halperin's colleague Ben Hubbard. "We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza."
Toward that end, the center will give $750,000 to nine liberal campus publications at such places as Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin, and help launch four at the universities of Michigan, Chicago, Kentucky and Ohio State. This is dwarfed by the more than $30 million a year that they estimate conservative campus organizations receive from such groups as the Young America's Foundation and Leadership Institute.
Leah Caldwell, editor of Issue at the University of Texas, says she and two friends broke away from the school's daily paper because they felt that racial issues were being "sanitized" and more national coverage was needed. She says the center's $3,000 grant will put the magazine on a regular monthly schedule rather than struggling to raise money for each edition.
The project, being launched this week, includes a Web site, CampusProgress.org, that will act as a clearinghouse for student journalism, along with contributions and interviews from the likes of Larry David, Al Franken and Margaret Cho. And the site will offer policy guidance. "We'll call them crib sheets, but they're talking points," says Halperin, a former Clinton White House speechwriter.
Also underway is a speakers' bureau (such as Al Sharpton and Armstrong Williams discussing the black vote this week at Howard University) and a training program, putting young journalists in touch with staffers for the Nation, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly and American Prospect.
The venture plans full-page newspaper ads that are anything but subtle. Featuring pictures and quotes from Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and James Dobson, the ads say: "Conservatives in Washington are attacking our personal freedoms. Young Americans fight and die in a war built on their deceptions. . . . Don't Just Sit Around. Connect. Engage. Speak Up."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22088-2005Feb13?language=printer
 
posted by Jessica at 2:23 PM | Permalink |