Some people are in the right job at the right time and Adele Malpass is one of them. As President of the Daily Caller News Foundation, she guides a large right-of-center newsroom that investigates and tells stories that are overlooked or intentionally ignored by the biased media.
As a non-profit, the DCNF’s public purpose goal is to create a new type of journalist who uses fact-based reporting to challenge the narrative of the mainstream media—by explaining capitalism, limited government, and the founding principles of America through hundreds of news stories and commentary pieces per month. When not in the newsroom, she is actively reaching out to the conservative policy community for timely commentary pieces, managing the fellow’s program, and fundraising.
In many ways, Adele was born into this role. Literally. Adele’s father was a well-known journalist, author, and newspaper owner in greater Washington. At age 11, Adele had a neighborhood paper route after school and by her teens, she was reporting on zoning board meetings. She absorbed the ideas and ideals that undergird American journalism: following the facts, speaking truth to power, and, above all, demanding an unwavering commitment to free speech and the First Amendment.
At age 11, Adele, daughter of a newspaper family, had a neighborhood paper route after school and by her teens, she was reporting on zoning board meetings. She absorbed the ideas and ideals that undergird American journalism.
Adele’s early career gave her in-depth knowledge of the workings of government. After a master’s degree at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs and Public Policy, she worked for New York Congressman Bill Green and learned the ropes of New York City politics. Returning to Washington, she joined the Senate Budget Committee staff as an analyst handling banking and learning the budget and appropriations process. While watching the national debt grow by the hour, she met a former Budget Committee staffer at Senator Dominici’s holiday party, David Malpass, then at the State Department. Four children and 30 years later, they still talk debt limits, taxes, and the high cost of regulation—clearly a match made in heaven. David calls her his energy and inspiration, so true.
At the end of the Bush-41 administration, the new couple moved to New York City. Adele landed a job with CNBC, rapidly working her way up the corporate news ladder while starting a family in the Big Apple. She booked guests, ran the booking unit, produced live business news hits, launched new shows such as Squawk Box, and then landed the coveted slot of Money-Politics Reporter.
Her skills grew with CNBC, but so did her hours and her family. She eventually moved on to being a freelance business writer for the New York Post’s business section and producing segments for PBS’s Adam Smith Show. After her fourth child and a vital supporting role in her husband’s 2010 Tea Party bid to unseat Kristen Gillibrand for the U.S. Senate, she served on the Republican Platform Committee in 2012 and then became chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party.
This was a tall task in one of the bluest of blue U.S. cities. But for Adele, it made sense. “After listening to voters throughout New York, I heard repeated stories about the difficult small business environment, high taxes, and the burden of too many regulations,” she said.
She immediately set out to flip city council seats and even take down Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who will perhaps go down as one of the most inept persons to hold public office.
“It was clear the only way to win elections and change the path of New York City was to recruit better candidates and register more voters,” said Malpass. After 20 years of Republican mayors, there were many voters nostalgic for pro-business anti-crime leaders who wanted a growing and stable city. She adds, “Republicans needed to convince voters that the bad policies could be reversed and that New York City would once again be a safe and attractive place to live.”
While in New York, Adele, who has served as a board member of Independent Women’s Forum, was one of the like-minded women who met in IWF Chairman Heather Higgins’ apartment in the mid-90s to discuss a path forward for IWF. They hammered out a positive agenda that would make the lives of women (and men) better. Malpass is proud of the important role IWF is playing in this, including telling the truth about issues the Left would prefer to hide. “Who would have thought that in 2023 we would need to say that women are women, but of course we do?” she says.
In 2016, her role took a dramatic turn. The Republican Presidential campaign was being run from Trump Tower in Manhattan, and she would become county chair to the President of the United States. Again, the right job at the right time. She organized the campaign launch for Vice President Mike Pence, appointed members of the Trump family to be delegates at the RNC convention, and continued her push to register voters, recruit candidates, and communicate the policy divide between the two parties.
Her husband helped focus the campaign’s strong economic message on growth and, in 2017, became Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs, his dream job. So, after 25 years in New York, they packed up the family and moved back to Washington—the city where they’d met and wed.
After her fourth child and a vital supporting role in her husband’s 2010 Tea Party bid to unseat Kristen Gillibrand for the U.S. Senate, she became chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party.
They moved to Washington, D.C., but Adele’s career linking journalism and public affairs was far from over. “I was eager to get back into journalism and report the news,” said Malpass, so in 2017 she started as the National Political Reporter at RealClearPolitics where she covered the 2018 midterms. “I noticed quickly that having been on the ground in local politics, my outlook had changed on how I reported the news. I had seen firsthand how the voter rolls were a mess, that dead people could vote, and that counting absentee ballots was more complicated than tabulating machine ballots. I became an election integrity warrior well before the pandemic and the 2020 election.”
Always looking for new challenges, Adele joined the DCNF as president in March 2022. The DCNF is a nonprofit with two distinct missions: to train the next generation of conservative journalists and to produce ground-breaking original reporting. The DCNF does this by running a two-year program to train journalists starting out in their careers. Journalists don’t just receive on-the-job training and a daily byline; they also get classroom-style lectures from the best in the business. On the reporting side, the DCNF specializes in reporting and packaging the kind of stories corporate and legacy media outlets dismiss or outright ignore. These stories are sent across their newswire to partner sites that include the Daily Caller, Daily Signal, Epoch Times, and more.
Who better to lead the DCNF through a truly trying time for the media at large? “The media is at a turning point,” Adele says. “What’s happened is polarization and an unholy alliance between big tech, the Democratic Party, media, and, as we now know, the government. Those four together have aligned in a way that we’ve never seen before in our history.” As the DCNF’s own reporting has found, millions of dollars are being pumped into a Censorship Industrial Complex to block conservative viewpoints from being aired.
It goes beyond just the anti-constitutional triumvirate Malpass mentioned above. The Left has deputized outside groups to do the government’s dirty work for them and apply pressure on any tech companies that show the slightest bit of concern for users’ free speech rights. Big left-wing foundations are pouring millions into universities, think tanks, and research outfits to combat so-called dis- and misinformation, which always just happens to be whatever views and news run counter to the Left’s zeitgeist. These groups not only target conservatives on social media and block them on search engines, they are also looking to bankrupt conservative news outlets, like the DCNF.
With the Biden administration actively cheerleading this Orwellian regime, it’s hard for many to see how the center-right can prevail. But not Adele. To her, this is an opportunity for conservative journalists to distinguish themselves as defenders of the foundational values of American journalism and, indeed, the country as a whole. “Our founders wanted a free press because they feared a powerful government and they wanted journalists to hold their leaders accountable by publishing unpopular ideas and controversial opinions,”
Adele said. “That is the foundation of our First Amendment and what our founders envisioned for a free press.”
And who is better to mentor and launch the careers of young journalists than Adele Malpass? “Americans are hungry for the truth, for real news. They know the media establishment can’t be trusted. Look at any poll on the media’s credibility and it becomes obvious. People want a media that reports facts in a truthful way on issues that matter to them, not a media that simply regurgitates what the party in power wants and cheers when their fellow Americans are harassed, canceled, or censored.”
That’s what Adele aims to deliver as DCNF president. To bring American journalism back to its constitutional roots and away from the biased censorship behemoth it has become. Back to the kind of press environment she was literally born into, where the First Amendment, truth, and holding power to account were the north stars.