Mary Katharine Ham is a Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism and gave a speech titled “The Left’s Outrage Industry” on Monday night. She is a Fox News contributor, the host of two podcasts, “Getting Hammered” with Vic Matus and “Normally” with Karol Markowicz, and a freelance writer. She is also a wife and mother of four children.
Q. Why did you decide to be a journalist?
A. I may have decided to be a journalist because of genetic predisposition. I’m a fourth generation newspaper journalist. My great-grandfather started a newspaper in Pitts, Georgia. My grandfather was a writer for him before he went into the Army and pursued other things later. My dad was a lifetime newspaper editor. So, I grew up in a newspaper house, not really a political house, but still a news junkie house. I consumed a lot of news as a child, got several newspapers per day, and watched the evening newscast back when those were basically the only way to consume news. I went to school for journalism, and then was briefly determined to not be a journalist. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be like my dad,’ but I was just like my dad. Then I got out of school and at the time, getting a newspaper job was actually a fairly common thing to do, because you could find a good entry-level job, and there were more of them available in local news. I liked meeting new people and exploring a community, which is a great thing. A great way to do that is being a reporter.
Q. What’s your favorite part of being a political contributor?
A. It’s a very unique field of journalism. I accidentally stumbled into new media, a gig that allows me basically to be myself for a living. I analyze news, but I am not in charge of voicing anyone else’s point of view. I get to evaluate things on my own. I very much like being able to evaluate things independently and to be at different networks or different environments, but always be myself and try to be true to what I believe. I enjoy talking to people who might disagree with me, and I do a lot of work on college campuses. Also, a lot of college campuses have a lot of left-leaning students, and I want them to feel free to disagree with me. It doesn’t bother me.
Q. What’s your favorite memory from working in journalism?
A. The most rewarding thing I’ve done was I co-moderated a 2016 primary debate. There were nine candidates at the time, including Donald Trump. I believe it was right before the debate where Trump went after Megyn Kelly really hard. And so there was a risk if he was going to come at me while I was doing this job. It was an ABC debate, so I was partnered with David Muir and Martha Raddatz, and I asked about four or five questions. I was widowed in 2015 when I was seven months pregnant with my second child. I had a baby two months after my husband died, and that debate was four months after he died. So I had a 2-month-old baby, traveled to New Hampshire, took my mom with me, and made it happen. And it’s obviously very rewarding to me, because it was this comeback and proof to myself that I could continue to do very tough things and have a career and make this all work together.
Q. What do you like about new media?
A. It sort of flattens the professional world a little bit. Frankly, journalism is not rocket science. You go listen to something, or you go tape something, and you present the information to the public. A lot of people can do that who don’t have to be official journalists. And so I like the fact that the barrier to entry is low. Now, the downside is you have to check everything that you’re consuming and make sure that it’s coming from somebody reliable, or that the information is reliable. But I like that I get to hear more voices, and have access to more voices than when I was a kid. Even though I consumed a lot of media, the media was coming from three different newspapers and three different networks total. That was it. Then I would hear my dad’s takes. Now, I can fill my feeds with a bunch of different ideas, and I try to proactively do that.
Q. Why should young people go into journalism?
A. If you want to be an engaged citizen, you’re halfway to being a journalist. Being a journalist is just taking what you’ve learned and telling people about it. If you have a passion for getting to the bottom of things, if you have a passion for holding people accountable, there are actually a lot of gaps doing that now because of the industry and because the bottom sort of fell out economically from local news. I think you can do a real public service and get attention by exposing things that are right out there for the taking and that nobody has, like doing a Freedom of Information Act request because no one’s employed to do those jobs anymore. I think that the skill of just knowing how to do a FOIA easily and knowing what to ask for, that’s a superpower these days. There’s so much that’s available to you.
Q. What is your advice to Hillsdale students?
A. Even if you don’t want to do journalism, making a decision about how much you’re going to expose yourself to, where you’re going to get news, how you’re going to connect that to your daily life, and how not to get overwhelmed or anxious about it, is just part of being a human now. You need to make a practice of pausing about what you’re consuming. Be patient, try to compare accounts, and then be conscious of what you’re taking in.
Q. What’s it like balancing being a wife, mother, and journalist?
A. I designed my career to be flexible. I had a Covid-era work-from-home situation before that was a thing. But I did it on purpose, because I wanted to be more flexible for my kids, and I saw an opening for it. Now on the way to doing that, in order to get flexibility, I sometimes gave up pay, I sometimes gave up prominence, I sometimes gave up health care benefits that didn’t come with contract work. I had to fill in those holes in different ways. So there was always a negotiation process with that, but to me, those things were worth giving up to have the flexibility.
Q. What is one thing you would tell your college-age self?
A. For one, I would learn to do FOIA sooner, and make it a practice. Secondly, I would specialize more if I had to do my career over again. I ended up a generalist, and I consider myself very lucky that I get to cover a lot of things, and that I never get bored. But I think that version of journalism might be a lot rarer now, and not that many people get to do that. If you’re out there looking for ways that people are solving problems, that would be something interesting that you end up being the expert on.
