MediaFest says it’s the largest media convention in the country, aimed at both student and professional “journalists.” This year, one of our top writers, White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan, was set to participate in a session for young reporters on how her faith fits into her work.
Until they found out she was a conservative.
That’s the story from the Columbia Journalism Review, which revealed yesterday that Olohan and another journalist, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen, were pulled from the event after complaints from a he/him “student media adviser” at Oregon State University named Steven Sandberg.
Sandberg had been “browsing” the event schedule when he saw, according to CJR, a “portion of the conference called the ‘Faith Track’” that included authors with “pretty far-right, anti-LGBTQ language.”
Sandberg alerted the “non-partisan” organizers of the conference and told them that “LGBTQ students are feeling targeted by our administration, by the government, and by society.” Sandberg told them he was “disappointed to see them bring in people who espoused anti-LGBT views,” and they buckled.
Olohan was alerted that she’d been removed from the event by the ethics committee chairman at the Society of Professional Journalists, a man named Michael Koretzky, who told other organizers that they “found reporting problems” with Olohan’s work.
The only problematic article cited from Olohan, who has without question broken more stories of consequence in her young career than Koretzky will in his lifetime, was an exclusive on a bill from Congressman Brandon Gill that would make it illegal to dump aborted baby remains into publicly-owned water systems.
The suggestion from Koretzky was that the article wasn’t balanced enough. Now, if he has an abortionist who would like to defend flushing babies down the toilet, we’d love to dig into that belief. But we never believed the issue was with our journalism, and now, that’s confirmed.
Koretzky was looking for an excuse to cancel Olohan because Sandberg and the pronoun mafia demanded he do so, and the angry left is the real ombudsman of the liberal media elite. And Sandberg was so proud of his work that he ran to the Columbia Journalism Review to tell the story of how he preserved a safe space for his LGBTQ students.
Any suggestion that MediaFest will be a conference with balance is delusional. One of the featured speakers will be New York Times grifter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has made millions of dollars spreading lies through the 1619 Project, which argues that systemic racism is in America’s DNA.
We challenge the Society of Professional Journalists to find a single piece of balanced work she’s ever produced, but guarantee that it will find them all as radical as her most recent piece, which attacked Charlie Kirk as a bigot just a few days after he was laid to rest.
Her session at MediaFest is titled, “How journalists can (and should) cover attempts to erase Black history.” It will be moderated by Koretzky’s colleague at Society of Professional Journalists, Celia Wexler, who serves as the group’s Washington, D.C., president.
We don’t expect Koretzky to get it, nor do we understand how he’s been put in charge of ethics of anything. His body of work includes a 2019 piece inspired by a convention he attended with high school journalists — about all the sex he’s had in his life.
We wish we were joking. Its opening line (we don’t recommend clicking, but it’s hard to believe without the proof) is: “Almost all the sex I’ve had is because of journalism.” It goes on to tell the tale about a time a “sexual encounter” at a journalism conference ended in “bloodshed” because he was bitten on the penis.
Again, he was inspired to write this because he was “presenting a couple of sessions tomorrow to high school journalists.”
A year later, he wrote about how he himself was now banned from attending certain journalism events because, he transparently explains, the aforementioned article on his sexcapades.
“We also were contacted by students and spoke with members who were extremely concerned about your blog post related to seemingly non-consensual sex and journalism conventions,” he says he was told. There was also an accusation that he told a student he could “make or break her career.” He denies it.
We’re partly glad Olohan is, as the kids say, “marked safe” from the MediaFest confab, but also disheartened.
Every few years, the liberal media elite proclaim that they care about being balanced and hearing both sides. And we’re sure that every few years there are people who believe them. Don’t be one of those people.
Young journalists don’t need MediaFest or the Society of Professional Journalists anymore. They will teach you to do everything wrong, and you’ll end up like Koretzky or Sandberg.
There are now great alternatives, like the National Journalism Center, The Fund For American Studies, and even conservative undergraduate journalism programs like the one at Hillsdale College.
The young journalists gathering at MediaFest are being trained to believe that there is only one set of acceptable facts, even if it doesn’t fall on the same side as objective truth. The prospect of hearing the other side has media advisers like he/him Sandberg throwing up arms.
The media elite don’t actually believe there are two sides. That’s why when Elon Musk opened up X to free speech, they ran away to BlueSky — which, not coincidentally, is where you can find most of the journalists featured on MediaFest’s panels.
But they’re also not the real elite anymore. Their monopoly on information has shattered, in a large part because Americans are increasingly turning to reporters like Olohan and The Daily Wire for news.
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