I’m remembering a conversation that I think a lot about these days.

When I was in high school I did debate and extemp and our team had physical subscriptions to Time and Newsweek. It was the early 90’s. (Oh lord this is going to be a thread, 1/1,000,000)

Every week I’d read and physically cut out articles to copy and file for the team. In extemp we relied on physical articles that we had to cite as evidence for our speeches that we wrote in 30 minutes. I had a Whitewater file, a Tonya Harding file, etc. I went to regionals!

When I went to college, reading the news was so ingrained in my routine that I subscribed to Newsweek and eventually Texas Monthly to keep up. This was 1994. I went to a Baptist college in Texas.

One day, a boy in my freshman class saw me reading Newsweek at lunch and said “I used to subscribe to Newsweek but I cancelled it because they’re too liberal.” I was confused. How could *the news* be liberal?

I knew about Rush Limbaugh and liked him for being a conservative dissenter. I liked being the most conservative voice in the room in high school. But I always read the news. The news was the news.

Anyways! I grew up as a conservative person with a passion for information. My freshman year of college was the 1st time I met someone who said “I reject this information because it doesn’t fit my values.” I was like, “huh?”

I worked hard as a high school student to mould stories into my religious, conservative perspective but it never occurred to me to reject journalism itself as biased. 25 years later, I feel like the ENTIRE GOP HAS REJECTED JOURNALISM AS A CONCEPT.

Anyways, this thread was a tribute to the 1st time someone told me he refused to read news from anyone who wasn’t a conservative Christian. He was my lil’ harbinger, God bless him.