Campus Reform, a conservative national media organization focusing on higher education, sent recruitment emails to several SIU students. 

Their attempts to contact students have been sporadic, with some students receiving recruitment messages as early as February. According to the recruitment email that a recipient provided to the Daily Egyptian, they are looking for students who have experienced or heard about “liberal bias” on college campuses.

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In its mission statement, Campus Reform describes itself as a “conservative watchdog in the nation’s higher education system.” Its articles, or “opinions” as they are called on the publication’s website, are largely written objectively and in a neutral tone but focus almost exclusively on sticking points of conservative policy and ideology, such as LGBTQ+ identities and student activism. 

Campus Reform is operated by the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on training and mentoring conservative leaders. The Leadership Institute has trained many leaders in the American conservative movement since its founding in 1979, including U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence.

Included in the Campus Reform recruitment email sent to SIU students are job descriptions for two positions offered by the publication. The first is as an investigator, who researches examples of liberal bias on their campus and is paid for every tip they provide that is used in a published opinion. The second is a correspondent, a term that typically refers to a journalist who reports on or from a remote location or region. 

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Correspondents for Campus Reform do the work of an investigator, but write the articles to be published on their website, rather than submitting them as tips. The recruitment emails did not disclose how much these positions would be paid. 

In an email sent to the Daily Egyptian responding to a request for comment, Campus Reform editor-in-chief Zachary Marschall wrote, “The Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform recruits college students across the country to investigate and report on leftist bias in higher education as part of our Young Journalists Program. 

“These students receive mentoring and training in journalism best practices and ethics from Campus Reform’s professional staff.  The more than 170 alumni of the Young Journalists Program currently working in media are a testament to the strength of the skill-building and networking opportunities students take advantage of while working for Campus Reform.”

During the fall semester, flyers were posted around SIU with a QR code leading to an online survey, advertising an Amazon gift card giveaway. Those who completed the survey, like SIU student Adaline Tucker, would be signed up for a Leadership Institute mailing list as well as receiving a Campus Reform recruitment email.

“When I was taking (the survey), the questions were about how I felt about the political climate on campus and whether or not I felt that you could comfortably express Christian values on campus,” Tucker said. “It seemed like the audience for this survey was not necessarily me. It was definitely pushing an agenda for the right.” 

Tucker describes the “opinions” on the publication’s site to be “sensationalist,” particularly their headlines. 

The organization has reported on events at SIU since 2016, most recently covering Kaitlynn Wheeler’s appearance at a Turning Point USA event on Oct. 10, 2024. Wheeler appeared at the event as an ambassador for the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute. 

The organization was founded in August 2024 and, according to Gaines’ website, seeks to recruit those “targeted by the left” and train them to “defend America’s founding principles.” The center and their ambassadors have focused heavily on women’s sports, specifically on calls for and attempts by transgender women to participate in women’s sporting events.

Although content since the inauguration of President Donald Trump has largely focused on universities not complying with federal mandates, many older articles focus on the actions of individual professors and student organizations. An article posted on Sept. 27, 2024, for example, focused on the Saluki Furry Society, an SIU group dedicated to the furry fandom and people who enjoy anthropomorphic animals. The post features a picture of the organization’s flier and a quote taken from a Daily Egyptian article on the group becoming an officially registered student organization in March 2018.

Beneath every Campus Reform “opinion” is a public recruitment form, beginning, “Conservative students on college campuses are marginalized, threatened, and silenced by threatening students who oppose their views, or radicalized leftist professors or administrators.” This is a common opinion among conservatives, as shown by an Associated Press article in October 2023, which claimed at the time, 9% of conservative students believed they could speak their minds on college campuses. 

“I thought that was really inappropriate and pretty surprising to read,” Tucker said. “So I went on the website that it mentions in the email, and I saw that the Campus Reform group had a long list from all of the examples of what they wanted, essentially, from all over the country, other articles that were submitted by these so-called student journalists.”

Alex Mahadevan is the director of MediaWise, a project of the Poynter Institute dedicated to empowering people to identify misinformation and practice media literacy. Mahadevan warns to think critically when engaging with media platforms such as Campus Reform.

“I would definitely not call Campus Reform a legitimate news site,” Mahadevan said. “I could not find a single article that offered anything that had any semblance of legitimate journalistic ethics. The reporting is incredibly biased, not only in the language and the subject matter but also the sources that are quoted. I did not ever see a source quoted from the other side of the aisle.

“As you start reading an article, just make sure you read the ‘about’ page and find out more about who owns the outlet and then you can really find out more about the bias that might be coming through in the articles,” he said.

“The reason news and media literacy are really important right now is because you have these websites like Campus Reform that might on their face look like a legitimate news site but if you have news and media literacy skills, you have the ability to follow links to the original source, you know how to investigate the journalist that wrote something or the outlet itself, how to kind of follow digital breadcrumbs, then you can quickly identify these sites for what they actually are, which are these kind of propaganda outlets.”

Staff reporter Morrigan Carey can be reached at [email protected]. To stay up to date with all your southern Illinois news, follow the Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Twitter.

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