 Stephen Bannon listens during Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s round-table discussion on security at Trump Tower in New York last month. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters) In the past couple of months, there has been a great deal of discussion, including from yours truly, about whether Donald Trump might pursue a career in media should he lose the presidential election in November, and if so, what that career might consist of. But whatever Trump does next, there’s more to conservative media than whatever Trump and his campaign chief executive, former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon, dream up. My friend, the thoughtful conservative blogger Matt K. Lewis, pondered what will happen to other outlets and news figures after an election that has shaken up the conservative media space in a post he published this week. Matt writes: For as long as I can recall, there has been a dichotomy with journalists/writers on one side and bloggers and talk radio hosts, etc. on the other. The former are (typically) more thoughtful and principled, but often less pragmatic. The latter were more populist, partisan, and less snooty. The journalists appear to concern themselves primarily with esoteric ideas, while the bloggers engage in activism. A well-run movement requires both species to fully function, but this divide has led to the inevitable differences of opinion that might ultimately prove untenable. Trump has, as has been the case in so many spheres, shattered the fault lines. The split between the NeverTrump movement and Trump supporters does not strictly adhere to the old divisions that pit conservative journalists/writers in a friendly, if tense, competition with bloggers/radio talk show hosts.
If I can venture a suggestion, a good place to start would be a serious investment in reporting. This is an area where conservative media, particularly online start-ups, has tended to lag behind left-leaning outlets, which have a long and vigorous history of muckraking. Stunts like James O’Keefe’s, or the attempted stings on Planned Parenthood, have gotten a lot of attention on the right, but they’re not the same thing as reportage: Provoking a potentially newsworthy reaction is not the same thing as finding out what’s already going on and bringing it to light. Stories like those, and intense focus on things like Benghazi or Hillary Clinton’s emails, have been effective on the level that prompt investigations and grind the work of government down to a much slower speed, if not to a complete halt. But this approach has also had consequences, in training readers to think conspiratorially and to reject the findings of both legitimate mainstream news organizations and rigorous investigations. And these conditions make it much easier for Donald Trump to evade criticism and claim the Republican Party’s nomination for president. If conservative journalists want to avoid that sort of outcome, as well as criticism for their contribution to it, the first step would be to return to the tools of traditional reporting. Rebuilding the credibility of those tools with conservative readers would be a service to journalism in general. And the scoops conservative outlets might find by using those tools would be a service to conservative journalism. | 
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