In the sea of good pieces last week about the Dave Weigel imbroglio, his own explanation of events stood out. And there was one paragraph that particularly interested me:

In 2004, when I was graduating [from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism], I was offered two jobs — an editing role at the libertarian magazine Liberty and a fellowship at USA Today, sponsored by the conservative Collegiate Network. I chose the USA Today job, but kept freelancing, mostly for magazines like The American Spectator and Reason.

I was familiar with the Collegiate Network from my own college days; it funded a conservative publication on campus, and that’s what I thought the extent of their work was. But I didn’t realize that it also pays for journalists to work at mainstream news organizations. So I contacted USA Today and got this reply from spokesperson Elga Maye:

We’ve had Collegiate Network interns — including Weigel — working with the paper’s editorial board for several years. They participate in board discussions, their primary daily duty is fact-checking, and their work (like that of all interns) is closely supervised. Toward the end of their internships, some have written editorials reflecting the board’s consensus or, less frequently, bylined op-ed pieces reflecting their own point of view. Their value to us — apart from their labor — is to add another voice, young and conservative, to the diversity of perspectives we already have on an ideologically mixed editorial board.

In that context, the fact that they have a strong point of view — their own, not the Collegiate Network’s — is an asset. We’d gladly take a qualified intern from a liberal organization on the same terms if we were aware of such a program.

The Collegiate Network describes these jobs as year-long fellowships, with stipends of $24,000 to $30,000 paid by CN, and along with USA Today lists Roll Call among outlets where it’s placed journalists. Their Wikipedia page also lists a wide variety of conservative publications and outlets, but also US News & World Report. The application form also lists the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the News & Observer, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and my old paper The Dallas Morning News — although that form doesn’t differentiate between summer internships and the year-long fellowships. And based on this post, fellows aren’t just on the editorial board — they’re also writing news stories.

We normally don’t write about issues of media bias here — we leave that to the 10 million other people out there who write about media bias — so I didn’t pursue this any further. Go make your own calls! But given what some journalists have argued recently about the proper role of ideology and opinion in a newsroom — which is to say, no role — it’s an interesting data point that a political group is paying the salaries behind some of the bylines you see.