New Hampshire Hardball:
Conservative Media is Alive and Well
in the Granite State
By Howard Polskin, January 22, 2024
For much of the past eight decades, Union Leader of Manchester, NH, was considered one of the most conservative daily newspapers in the country. Its reputation was enhanced by the quadrennial presidential primaries, which cast New Hampshire and its largest newspaper in an outsize role shaping the race for the Oval Office. Every fourth January the national media circus would roll across the Granite State’s snow-choked hamlets and gritty mill towns reporting on the nation’s first primary.
While that tradition hasn’t faded, the underlying dynamics have shifted considerably since the turn of the century. With the rise in digital media, the newspaper industry cratered, diminishing the profits and influence of papers large and small. The Union-Leader was no exception. And with little fanfare, the voice of the Union Leader’s editorial pages gradually moderated, culminating with its endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020, its first backing of a Democrat in more than 100 years.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the tradition of outspoken conservative media is dying or dead in New Hampshire. Two scrappy digital outlets, the Granite Grok and Conservative View from New Hampshire (CVNH) have quietly emerged this century and are walking in the deep red footprints of the Union Leader’s editorial page, lobbing their conservative views against the wall to see what sticks. No one comes close to suggesting that they can replace the impact of the Union Leader in its heyday. But a case can be made that if they are not the direct descendants of the fabled Union Leader, then they are at least its unruly step-children.
The Original
William Loeb III ran the Union Leader from 1946 until his death in 1981. He wrote an average of more than 170 editorials each year and they reverberated across the state with the delicacy of a jackhammer. “Loeb didn’t hide his opinion,” said Joseph McQuaid, the Union Leader’s editor for more than a decade until 1999. “He put it on the front page in bold type.”
Loeb became a national controversy magnet with his staunch anti-Communist views and fearless attacks on presidents. “He liked the media attention so much he ran an editorial every day of the week except Sunday,” McQuaid adds. “His practice was to run every letter to the editor. If there was a letter ripping him, there was a boldface response from him. It was like a tennis match.”
His defining moment came 52 years ago, when he ran an editorial that ultimately led to the end of the presidential bid of Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, a front-runner before the 1972 New Hampshire primary.
Carrying On the Tradition
Like Loeb, Ray Cardello, Jr., founder of CVNH, specializes in publishing his own blistering editorials. And he’s been doing it without missing a single day since launching in early 2021, according to TheRighting’s 2022 profile of him.
Cardello, 69, a retired sales executive, lives with his girlfriend in Exeter, NH, which just happens to be the birthplace of the Republican party. He drives a school bus part time and spends the rest of his time writing or watching Fox News. A lot of Fox News. He estimates he tunes in six hours a day, along with CNN, MSNBC and BBC News often at the same time.
Consuming such a large volume of news and opinion – okay, a lot of opinion – enables Cardello to opine himself on a wide range of mostly national topics all with a decidedly right wing slant. He’s written more than 1,200 articles in his obsessive quest to have his voice heard. He’s a free-wheeling pundit attacking everything from electric vehicles, DEI and President Biden, who he naturally refers to as Obama’s puppet.
CVNH is so small that Cardello doesn’t even know how much traffic his site receives. But his voice get amplified because his work pops up regularly on other sites populating the back alleys of right wing media. These include USSA News and the right wing aggregator the Conservative Daily News where he often gets 20-30 comments a post . “I wish there were some monetary benefits to accrue,” he sighs. “Few places pay for opinion pieces.”
A Popular Platform for Unvarnished Opinions
Another one of Cardello’s regular outlets is the more established and prolific Granite Grok, which has been publishing since 2006 and attracts almost 100,000 unique visitors a year. The site has always depended on unpaid articles from its stable of writers, most of whom are eager to express a strong right wing point of view. In an earlier generation, those same contributors would have been licking stamps and sending their opinionated letters to the Union Leader. Today, they blog. “It was a hobby for people to get something off their chests and out of their heads. We gave them a platform,” says current co-owner and managing editor Steve MacDonald, 60.
That hobby for its collection of volunteer writers has become the backbone of much more ambitious operation, one that pays MacDonald a modest salary with advertising revenue and donations. Every day, including weekends, the Granite Grok publishes five to ten original stories from its rotating crew of roughly a dozen unpaid contributors. MacDonald alone churns out three to five pieces a day, usually no more than 600 words, like most of the content on his site. Many of the Granite Grok’s stories feel unpolished, like they needed another round of editing, or maybe even adult supervision. Nikki Haley was recently called a “globalist establishment meat puppet.”
That unvarnished quality hasn’t stopped the Granite Grok’s expansion efforts. The Vermont Grok launched in late summer of 2023, and later this winter the Maine Grok will be unveiled.
A Paper Evolves
This mirrors the Union Leader’s efforts decades ago in extending its brand under the guidance of Nackey Loeb, who took over the newspaper when her husband died in 1981 and ran it until her death in 2000. While she shared his arch-conservative views, Nackey nonetheless softened the tone of the paper’s editorials, and also “created products that specifically targeted right wing audiences outside of New Hampshire,” says Meg Heckman, author of the book “Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party.” Among them, according to Heckman, was the Union Leader Reader,” which collected a month’s worth of opinion from its pages and was sent to readers for free.
When Nackey Loeb died in 2000, her ownership stock in the Union Leader was bequeathed to the non-profit Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications which owns it to this day. Fostering local journalism remains one of the school’s priorities, an ironic twist for a small newspaper that built an outsize national reputation with its take-no-prisoners editorials.
An Enduring Defiance
How much influence CVNH and the Granite Grok have on the political landscape is questionable. Few politicians or state officials court the outlets. And they face competition across the political spectrum in New Hampshire from digital-only news brands like the NH Journal, Nashua Digital and the recently launched progressive Granite Post.
But maybe impact isn’t the main goal for the right wing websites. They’re not trying to be kingmakers or dragon slayers. All they want is a seat at the table to say what’s on their minds to the residents of New Hampshire and neighboring states, much like the Union Leader under the Loebs. And, like the Loebs, they go about their business with the same defiant attitude of New Hampshire’s in-your-face state motto “Live Free or Die.”
“Good for the Granite Grok and Conservative View from New Hampshire for being part of the conversation,” says Meg Heckman, who also teaches journalism at Northeastern University. “That’s what the First Amendment is all about. Get your voice out there and see what happens.”
Howard Polskin is the president and founder of TheRighting. He has been visiting New Hampshire almost every summer since he was a boy.
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Two scrappy digital outlets, the Granite Grok and Conservative View from New Hampshire have quietly emerged this century and are walking in the deep red footprints of the Union Leader’s editorial page, lobbing their conservative views against the wall to see what sticks. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)