Where to Find Reliable Conservative News Online
I've spent years tracking down sources that actually hold up under scrutiny. Most people who ask me about this want a simple list they can bookmark and forget. The reality is messier. A lot of what passes for conservative journalism has drifted into opinion land or worse, outright misinformation disguised as reporting. I'm going to give you a working list and explain how to actually use it without losing your mind. Here is the breakdown, organized by category. Not every site on this list is pure hard news. Some lean editorial, some are newsletters, some cover culture and policy from a right-of-center angle. I've tried to flag which is which below. Hard News and Reporting:
The Wall Street Journal editorial page and news division operate separately. The news side is solid, though occasionally soft on institutional narratives. The New York Post still does real reporting, particularly on crime and local New York politics. Fox News Channel and Fox News website produce competitive breaking coverage, though their opinion tent is where most of the fire comes from. CNN might be listed elsewhere, but it is not here. The Daily Wire covers breaking news with a right-leaning editorial slant. Newsmax competes in the cable space and online, though its editorial direction shifted noticeably after 2023. Washington Examiner reports on politics and policy with decent accuracy. The Hill is bipartisan by design but tends toward the center-right on coverage. National Review is older journalism with more substantive long-form work. The Federalist covers legal and cultural issues from a conservative perspective. RealClearPolitics aggregates and maintains good primary source tracking. Townhall publishes news and opinion across a wide range of right-of-center contributors. Policy and Think Tank-Adjacent Sources: The Heritage Foundation produces policy research that actually shapes legislation. Their website publishes digestible articles alongside longer reports. AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, does similar work with a more moderate institutional tone. Cato Institute leans libertarian conservative. The Manhattan Institute covers urban policy and culture with solid economic analysis. Hoover Institution at Stanford publishes history, policy, and economics. The Claremont Institute focuses on constitutional originalism and American founding principles. American Greatness covers policy with a nationalist conservative bent. The Dispatch is a newer outlet covering politics, culture, and foreign policy from a paleo-conservative and traditionalist angle. Spectator USA brings British conservative perspective to American politics. The American Prospect is actually left-leaning, so ignore it if that is not your thing. Breakpoint by Culture100 covers faith, culture, and politics. The Daily Beast and Mother Jones are not conservative outlets and should not appear on your list.
Cultural and Commentary Focused: First Things covers religion, culture, and politics from a thoughtful conservative perspective. Crisis Magazine focuses on Catholic conservative thought. The American Conservative publishes Paul Gottfried-style paleoconservatism and anti-interventionism. Compact Magazine is newer, covering culture and politics with intellectual rigor. Lawfare occasionally publishes conservative perspectives but skews establishment. Judicial Watch produces investigative reporting on government accountability. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists covers security and science with occasional right-leaning analysis. The American Spectator has decades of conservative commentary. The Weekly Standard closed in 2018, so remove it from any current list. The American Guardian is not a major outlet and barely registers. The American Conservative Union Foundation publishes policy briefs and commentary. The Heritage Foundation also runs podcasts and daily briefings worth subscribing to. The Federalist runs long-form essays and daily articles across multiple beats. The New Criterion covers arts and culture from a conservative position. City Journal published by the Manhattan Institute covers urban affairs. The American Interest covers foreign policy and domestic issues from a centrist-to-conservative view. Newsletters and aggregators that earn their keep:
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The Dispatch Newsletters offer daily and weekly summaries. The Bulwark, founded by moderate conservatives after 2016, publishes daily email newsletters. The RedState app aggregates conservative news and opinion. The Blaze covers entertainment-adjacent political news. The Young Turks are progressive, so exclude them. The Rubin Report hosts podcasts but also runs written content. The Ben Shapiro Show has a companion website with articles. The Megyn Kelly YouTube channel and website publish interviews and opinion. The Dan Bongino site covers news and conspiracy-adjacent commentary. The Alex Jones InfoWars is widely discredited and I do not recommend it as a reliable source. The Gateway Pundit started as genuine reporting but has increasingly published unverified claims and conspiratorial content. I stopped trusting it around 2020. The Drudge Report is an aggregator, not a source, but still useful for headline scanning. The Right Wing News operates similarly. The American Thinker publishes policy analysis and commentary. The Washington Free Beacon, now part of the Federalist family, did investigative reporting before the merger. The Observer, now called The American Prospect? No, The American Prospect is left. The Observer was a separate conservative outlet that folded and relaunched periodically. Local and regional conservative outlets: Each state tends to have at least one conservative newspaper or website. Texas Tribune leans center but has conservative contributors. The Chicago Tribune editorial page is Republican-leaning while the news desk stays straight. The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page has shifted over the years. State-level outlets like the Ohio Capital Journal, the Florida Times-Union opinion section, and the Georgia Public Sources cover regional politics. The Carolina Journal covers North and South Carolina. The Mississippi Freedom Report covers that state. The Alabama NewsCenter is independent but sympathetic to conservative positions. The Missouri Liberal Review is not conservative, ignore it. The Kentucky Center for Journalism covers state politics. The Indiana Political Forecast tracks Hoosier politics. The Kansas City Star's editorial page leans right. The Dallas Morning News editorial board is Republican. The Houston Chronicle editorial page is center-right. These local outlets often produce better reporting than national cables because they actually cover municipal government, school boards, and county commissions where policy decisions happen.
Podcasts with companion websites: The Matt Walsh Daily runs a website with transcripts and articles. The Eric Metaxas Show covers culture and religion. The Hugh Hewitt show had a long run before his death in 2023, but archives remain available. The Larry Elder Show continues with daily podcasts and website content. The Sean Hannity Show has a companion site. The Rudy Giuliani website publishes commentary, though his legal troubles have colored public perception. The SteveDeeShow covers culture and politics. The Joe Pags Show covers culture from a conversational style. The Mark Levin Show has extensive website content. The Mike Gallagher Podcast is moderate-conservative. The Charlie Kirk Show runs Turning Point USA content online. The Blazing Grails podcast has a companion site. The JRE clips and articles come from a libertarian-leaning but not consistently conservative perspective. The Tim Pool Autonomous Letters covers news with a contrarian bent that sometimes overlaps with conservative audiences. Specialized and niche outlets:
The Federalist Papers site covers constitutional law. The Volokh Conspiracy, run by law professors including Ezra Fried and Eugene Volokh, covers legal issues with conservative and libertarian perspectives. The Tax Foundation publishes tax policy analysis. The Cato Handbook publishes policy books and free-market research. The Hoover Digest covers ideas and policy. The Claremont Review of Books publishes academic-adjacent conservative essays. The Intercollegiate Review covers campus conservatism. The New Atlantis publishes bioethics and policy from a conservative perspective. The American Affairs Journal covers economics and foreign policy. The Journal of Democracy occasionally publishes conservative contributions but is not a conservative outlet. The National Interest covers foreign policy with realist orientation that overlaps with non-interventionist conservatism. The American Security Project covers defense policy. The Wilson Center digital cache publishes policy briefs from various perspectives including conservative scholars. Fact-checking and accountability sources: Media Matters is progressive, not conservative, despite what some conservative circles claim. FactCheck.org is nonpartisan but sometimes criticized from the right for false equivalency. PolitiFact has a history of center-left bias in its ratings, according to multiple independent audits. The Heritage Foundation's own fact-checking arm, the Center for Data Analysis, occasionally reviews claims. Judicial Watch litigates and reports on government accountability. The Government Accountability Institute covers regulatory and government waste issues. The Competitive Enterprise Institute covers regulatory overreach. The Manhattan Institute's Kevin Gutzman writes about federalism and state rights. The Independent Institute covers free-market policy. The Mackinac Center covers Michigan-specific and national libertarian-conservative policy. The Goldwater Institute covers Arizona and national liberty issues. The Pacific Legal Foundation covers property rights and regulatory law. The Institute for Justice covers constitutional liberty cases nationwide.
I want to be honest about a problem I ran into recently that most people never consider. When you compile a list like this, the sites change. Outlets fold, merge, get bought, pivot editorially, or quietly shift their positioning. I was building a reading routine for a friend last year and included a site that had been acquired by a larger media company six months earlier. The new owners changed the editorial direction within weeks, and the site started publishing content that contradicted everything it used to stand for. I missed it because I was relying on cached bookmarks and an old version of their site. The workaround was setting up Google Alerts for each domain and checking the about page monthly to see if ownership had changed. Also, archive.org snapshots helped me verify what a site actually published versus what I remembered it publishing. This takes maybe ten minutes a month per outlet and prevents you from accidentally building your news diet around a site that has quietly pivoted left or turned into pure conspiracy content. Another thing people miss: conservative news consumption has a selection bias problem that works differently than liberal news consumption. Liberal outlets tend to cluster around a center-left consensus with variations. Conservative outlets fracture into multiple factions: establishment Republicans, Trump-aligned populists, paleoconservatives, libertarians,neoconservatives,and traditionalists. A site that serves one faction may actively antagonize another. The Federalist and National Review, for example, have had very public editorial feuds. Understanding which faction a site represents helps you weigh their coverage correctly. A piece from The Dispatch on foreign policy will read very differently than the same topic on The American Conservative. Neither is wrong. They are just operating from different premises about America's role in the world. Also worth noting: several of these outlets have paywalls now. The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The American Affairs Journal, and The Dispatch all charge subscription fees. Some are worth it. Some are not. The Heritage Foundation and AEI publish free research. Judicial Watch publishes everything free. The blaze and Daily Wire offer free articles with premium tiers. My approach was to subscribe to three or four paid sources max and rely on free outlets for the rest. Spreading subscriptions too thin makes everything feel expensive and nothing gets read thoroughly.
If you want one practical starting point: pick three sources from the hard news category, two from policy, one cultural outlet, and one local source for your state. Rotate through them daily for a month. Notice which ones actually report facts versus which ones report outrage. The ones that make you angry without giving you new information are usually the opinion sections, not the news desks. Separate the two. Bookmark the news desks. Skip the rest unless you specifically want commentary.
