Whether she’s hosting her podcast After Party, appearing on-air with The Megyn Kelly Show, co-hosting the online show Breaking Points, or writing for UnHerd, Emily Jashinsky is a force to be reckoned with in the new media world. She’s interviewed the likes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, and she’s a senior fellow at Independent Women. But behind the camera and pen is the story of a Midwestern girl standing up for her roots in Washington, D.C.
As she spoke with IW Features, Jashinsky was walking home in D.C. after a morning of meetings.
“The day-to-day is insane,” Jashinsky told IW Features. “I have a full studio set up in my house… It’s a lot of broadcasting these days, and the news cycles are relentless.”
Even though Jashinsky is a mainstay of the D.C. new media scene, her roots are farther west in the woods of Wisconsin. She grew up hunting, fishing, and going to church—and hearing the media disparage her friends and family as “racist[s] or bigots.”
“It just was very frustrating to me, especially as a teenager during the early Obama years, the way media and Hollywood depicted people like my family—people who hunt or go to church every Sunday,” she said. “It was just factually wrong and morally wrong.”
That frustration led her all the way to D.C., where she studied political science at George Washington University and cut her teeth leading the Young Americans for Freedom chapter on her campus while interning for Christina Hoff Sommers at the American Enterprise Institute.
After graduating in 2015 during an election cycle, Jashinsky started her career as the media landscape was under an upheaval. Traditional broadcast media and print journalism were the old kids on the block, and a new wave of media was breaking containment.
“It’s pretty remarkable to remember those days after the 2016 election where everyone in media was kind of handwringing, taking a look at themselves in the mirror,” she said. “And ‘trusted’ media is now, again, tied for a record low.”
“After the host of Celebrity Apprentice wins the presidency over the former Secretary of State, you would think that would be the wake-up call,” she added.
Jashinsky has done her share of traditional media hits, but new media is her bread and butter. And in the world of new media, she is seeing the polished presentation of mainstream media merge with new media sensibilities and fresh perspectives.
“On Breaking Points, our set looks very similar to cable news,” she said. The show’s reputation for production value and its popularity recently won it an iHeart Podcast award for Best Political Podcast.
Yet the difference between new media and cable news is that new media is accountable to its audience, Jashinsky explained. It’s what has drawn her to the environment where she feels she can “remain fully authentic and honest.”
“Journalists have become such a part of the system that they’re defenders of the system,” she said. “They can’t look at the system objectively anymore because it would mean really interrogating their own successes and failures.”
Jashinsky freely admits that her own perspective is a Christian, conservative one, and unlike the journalists of yesteryear, she acknowledges that all journalists are biased.
“If you’re doing it right, you’re constantly checking your biases and checking in with people in normal places in the country,” she said.
Her life in D.C. looks very different from life where she grew up, she noted—she’s not hunting every weekend in the fall or fishing in the summer. Instead, she’s surrounded by the milieu of politics and media that pervades the capital. But it’s that self-awareness that sets her apart from many media personalities.
“You have to work really, really hard to try and pop that bubble every hour of every day when you’re in news,” she said.
Her goal is not to speak for all Americans or badger them with the “correct” answers on hot-button issues, though she is the first to admit that she has strongly held opinions. Instead, she told IW Features that her job as a journalist “is to ask the right questions.”
It’s this authenticity and questioning attitude that she’s also most hopeful for in the new media space.
“The gatekeepers have lost almost all of their power… Nick Shirley, for example, doesn’t pretend to be down-the-middle,” Jashinsky said, referring to the independent YouTuber whose videos investigating alleged fraud in blue states have gone viral. “He’s not pretending to be Walter Crockite.”
Instead, Americans have access to a variety of perspectives and can make up their own minds, rather than being presented a one-sided story.
However, with more choices and with diverging state policies, Americans are ideologically and physically sorting themselves into opposite political camps, Jashinsky said.
“I think we are ‘coming apart,’ to quote Charles Murray, at an even more accelerated rate,” she said.
Social media algorithms do not help either, Jashinsky explained, despite the opportunity social media platforms have given new media organizations.
“I won’t defend social media algorithms that are incentivized to keep people scrolling and therefore incentivizing extremism,” she elaborated. “I do think that’s a real problem for the future, but I also know that consumers are desperate to have information they can trust.”
Despite this, Jashinsky is more optimistic than ever. Even across the political aisle, she said she believes Americans can find common ground.
“I’d actually never expected to be hopeful about media ever,” she said. “I expected I would die being cynical about American media.
“The system’s broken, the political system’s broken, the culture is broken,” she added. “When you share that foundation with much of the rest of the country… then you can ask some really interesting questions and get to some really interesting places.”
That’s what she’s doing day-in and day-out in D.C.—bringing Americans together with thoughtful questions, authentic writing, and honest journalism. It’s that courage to carve new paths and dedication to tell the truth that makes her a Champion Woman.
