BEYOND HOOKERS,
HAMAS AND HAGEL
fellow, Capitol Hill correspondent
and presidential campaign reporter.
During last year’s CPAC gathering, Costa offered a college-aged
audience a piece of advice he had
received about the need to learn the
basics of reporting, rather than trying to become the next George Will
or Charles Krauthammer overnight.
“You can’t just stay in the conservative bubble,” Costa said. “If
you want to compete with all kind
of journalists — especially the liberal journalists — you’ve got to
be able to play their game and do
things how they do it.”
Costa certainly gets outside the
conservative bubble. His National
Review party last month was attended not only by right-of-center
scribes, but reporters from The
New York Times, Politico, ABC
News and USA Today. Costa has
made hundreds of appearances on
CNBC, for which he is an analyst,
and MSNBC, where he regularly
appears on Morning Joe, The Daily
Rundown and Hardball. Since
signing with CNBC in 2011, Costa
hasn’t appeared on Fox News. He
did, however, stop by NPR’s On
Point the morning after the party.
Held up as an example of the
conservative reporter with mainstream cred, Costa argues that it’s a
HUFFINGTON
03.24.13
matter of time and experience before others break through. The 2012
election was “baptism through fire”
for the conservative media, he said,
especially since some outlets didn’t
even exist the first time Obama ran.
“What I took away was, the
2012 campaign was a great learning experience for many conservative media reporters, across the
spectrum on the right,” Costa said.
“I think the news judgment in
many organizations — a lot of stories that were floated or thought
were hot never really stuck. It
wasn’t just because of bias on the
left or bias in the media.”
“Conservative journalists are
recognizing that they have to offer more to readers beyond talking points and columns,” Costa
added. “I think that’s the evolution right now — moving toward
narrative journalism, investigative journalism. It’s a growing
process. There will be
some growing pains.”
HuffPost
reporter
Michael
Calderone
discusses the
conservative
media’s
fixation on
scandals.
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