RIGHT HOOK.(Hugh Hewitt)

If one were to confer the distinction of Most Famous Conservative Journalist Whom Liberals Have Never Heard Of, a leading candidate would be Hugh Hewitt: author (of six books, most of which get to the point so efficiently that he brings a new one out every eighteen months or so); columnist (for the online edition of The Weekly Standard and the evangelical magazine World); blogger; and syndicated radio talk-show host. Hewitt, an unlined, inquisitive-looking, white-haired forty-nine-year-old with an amiable but relentless manner, lives and works in Orange County, California. In addition to his journalism, he practices law at a firm that bears his name, teaches at Chapman University School of Law, in Orange County, lectures and consults in the conservative-media world, is an elder in his church, serves on the Children and Families Commission of Orange County, and holds a series of honorary titles, such as California State Sommelier.

Hewitt stands for something more than just hyperactivity. Conservatives love to complain about journalism. Lately, they have been not only complaining more full-throatedly but also devising, with more energy than before, their own version of what journalism ought to look like: faster, more opinionated, more multimedia, and less hung up on distancing itself from the practice of politics than the daily-newspaper and network-news versions. Hewitt is at the center of this effort. If there is any battle to be waged next month over the confirmation of John Roberts, an old friend of Hewitt's, as a Supreme Court Justice, the conservative press (and Hewitt in particular) will be an enthusiastic participant. The idea is that it will make for a good test run of conservative journalism's enhanced capabilities, which would then be redeployed frequently. Hewitt's world is journalism's alternate universe.

Hewitt's radio employer, Salem Communications, owns a hundred and four radio stations, covering twenty-four of the country's twenty-five major markets, and purveys the work of eight talk-show hosts, five of them mainly conservative and three mainly Christian. Salem, whose headquarters are in Camarillo, California, is led by two brothers-in-law who are graduates of Bob Jones University; it is publicly held, and growing swiftly enough to have joined the handful of radio-station groups that are bunched together far behind the two national leaders, Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting. Hewitt is not the highest-rated member of the Salem stable--he is second to the film critic and writer Michael Medved--but he has an estimated weekly audience of seven hundred thousand, on a hundred and twelve stations. He can be heard just about everywhere except New York and Washington. "The Hugh Hewitt Show" is important enough to have attracted guests on the order of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove; governors, senators, and congressmen appear on it just about every day, and so do journalists. Hewitt thinks of himself as the most liberal-friendly of the Salem hosts--he calls his program "National Public Radio for conservatives."

I met Hewitt on a Sunday night in May, in New York; he was in town to attend a convention and to work on his project of building a conservative journalistic infrastructure outside of news organizations. He introduced me to a young man named Chuck DeFeo, who had just begun working at Salem. DeFeo spent most of his career working for John Ashcroft, when Ashcroft was a Missouri senator and then Attorney General; last year, he was "eCampaign Manager" for the Bush-Cheney campaign, in charge of adapting traditional grass-roots political organizing to the Internet. Now, with help from Hewitt, he is planning to turn a Salem Web site called Beyond the News into an ambitious--what?

The impression I got, over dinner at a midtown steak house, was that eventually--and ideally, from Hewitt's point of view--conservatives all over the country would read Beyond the News every morning, perhaps instead of their local newspapers. In its current form, Beyond the News looks like a conservative opinion site that also carries news columns. It often highlights stories that one hasn't read in the daily newspapers, and it tends to emphasize trends that conservatives find disturbing. (Last week, the headlines included "ILLEGAL ALIEN GRANTED ASYLUM BECAUSE HE'S GAY" and "ISRAEL BEGINS GAZA PULLOUT, HAMAS CELEBRATES.") Soon, there will be links to opportunities for political activity; clicking will generate a letter to a politician or provide the call-in number for a talk show. Hewitt says that he thinks of Beyond the News as "a group blog that's also a news magazine, with activist tools attached." The distinctions that the "mainstream media" hold dear--between news and opinion, ...