When reading Ingrid Jacques’ columns in USA TODAY during the 2024 election, the veteran connoisseur of journalism was likely to experience a strange feeling of déjà vu.
Jacques’s columns were so like, well, so like old-fashioned opinion journalism. Jacques’ columns, with a ballast of factual material, reflect a reasonable, non-hysterical approach to the news event of the day.
Another reason Jacques stands out: she is a Hillsdale-educated conservative with a libertarian streak—not the usual viewpoint one finds in the nation’s editorial pages. Which makes Jacques’s columns catnip for readers weary of the dictator-from-day-one/fascist! diatribes of many outlets.
A typical Jacques column was one headlined “I Don’t Like Trump. But Harris Is Making Me Vote for Him.” She lamented the role of the vice president, with her surrogates and the media in pushing her to do the unthinkable. Jacques did not mince words about a “mainstream media” that “(with few exceptions) have dropped any pretense of covering this election fairly and gone full steam ahead in helping Harris defeat Trump.”
Numerous newspapers, magazines, and television networks are doing soul-searching in the wake of Donald Trump’s march through the electoral college and popular vote. Mika and Joe even went to Mar-a-Lago. But Jacques wrote the “Don’t Make Me Do It” column in October, when the mainstream media was still salivating over the electoral hopes of the joy-bringer. In the wake of the Trump win, Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute opined that the media had committed suicide, by refusing to acknowledge such undeniable truths as that the president was in declining shape. Rosen suggested that the legacy media is so damaged that the future belongs to alternative media—websites, podcasts, Substack, and other forms that didn’t exist twenty years ago.
Jacques believes that the mainstream media has a future. Asked about a “conservatives need not apply” mentality at many newspapers, Jacques replies, “I think that will change, especially after this election…”
Jacques believes that the mainstream media has a future. Asked about a “conservatives need not apply” mentality at many newspapers, she replies, “I think that will change, especially after this election… I have been a working journalist for 20 years, and I spent 12 years at The Detroit News on the editorial board there before I got this job at USA TODAY in 2022. So, I’ve spent my career in mainstream media. The Detroit News was a conservative editorial page, but a mainstream newspaper.
“That was intentional on my part. I wanted to be a part of the ‘mainstream media’ and to reach an audience that I don’t think I would if I were at a more traditionally conservative publication like National Review, which I love, but I wanted to do something a little different. It does come with some challenges such as dealing with some coworkers who aren’t receptive to my points of view. But overall, I have had a lot of support and get really good responses from my readers.
“If media outlets, whether we’re talking newspapers or cable news, don’t offer more true diversity of ideas and opinions, I think their businesses are going to hurt. In the wake of the election, when so many of these media outlets realized that they had missed the mood of the country and what was really going on, I think there’s going to be more of an effort to bring on more diversity of viewpoints. USA TODAY made an effort a couple of years ago to start bringing on some conservative voices. When I was hired two years ago, I was the only conservative voice on our opinion team, but now there are three of us. That’s encouraging to see.”
Jacques, whose Scandinavian heritage is visible in her coloring and tresses of long blond hair, grew up in Salem, Oregon, the daughter of an engineer who owned a business that rebuilt Corvair engines and was a photography buff who had a darkroom in the house where he developed his own pictures. Ingrid and her brother, now a popular public school English teacher in Dallas, Texas, were homeschooled by their mother. Ingrid once wrote that her mother had “a passion for ancient Greece and Rome, and she’d infuse our daily lessons with relevant points of history or Latin roots to words. She also love[d] art and music.”
Although she is an advocate of homeschooling, Ingrid admits that there was a stigma. “I’d get the impression people were surprised my mom and I weren’t wearing bonnets and prairie dresses,” she wrote. “But my parents weren’t Amish or hippies. They simply believed this was the best decision for their children, and they couldn’t afford to send us to private school.”
It was an idyllic way to grow up. “Books were always close at hand,” Jacques wrote of her childhood and adolescence. “I have many memories of my mom rushing to her encyclopedias (this was before iPhones or the internet) to look up a word or historical event that had come up, even if it was during dinner. Any moment could be a time for learning.” She also loved “the magic” of looking at her father’s photographs.
She opted to go to Hillsdale College in Michigan, where her brother followed her the next year. “My decision to go to Hillsdale has just been so pivotal with everything else that’s happened in my life,” she says. “I really owe Hillsdale a huge debt of gratitude. Much like they advertise, you really learn to become an independent thinker and you get an appreciation for the liberal arts and the foundation of our country. We actually learned those things at Hillsdale. I was an English major. I decided to major in what I really loved, even though I was slightly fearful of not knowing exactly what a career might look like. I decided that, hey, I love to write, I love learning about new things, journalism might be a good fit for me. And it turns out I was right. But my Hillsdale education was hugely foundational for me.
“A few years after I graduated, I did get an opportunity to go back and work for the college for a few years. I was an adviser to the student newspaper and taught some reporting classes, and that was a wonderful experience. I hadn’t thought I would get into teaching at all, but through doing that, even though I was still pretty young in my career, I think it helped me become a better writer and better at what I do.”
While looking for a job in journalism, Ingrid landed a job as a barista at a Starbucks. When told this might come in handy if she ever runs for president, she laughs and says, “And I actually was! So, yeah, I’ve got the apron to prove it.” She adds, “I liked the people, and it ended up being really fun.”
“My decision to go to Hillsdale has just been so pivotal with everything else that’s happened in my life,” she says. “I really owe Hillsdale a huge debt of gratitude.”
She got her first job in journalism when she was hired by a weekly. “I started out with a small weekly paper in Southern Michigan,” Jacques recalls. “I covered everything from the school board meetings to local city council meetings, and that was a great introduction to boots-on-the-ground journalism. From there I got a job at a daily paper in Adrian, Michigan, and covered education there for about a year and a half. So, I have spent most of my career now in opinion journalism, but I’m glad I got the foundation of news reporting. I recommend that to any young person. It’s helpful to know how to report and how to get the information you need. No matter whether you’re bringing your opinion to it, you need to be able to come with the facts, even with opinion journalism. I feel like that’s even more important, because you want to be really sure that this point of view that you’re a proponent of is factual and that you know what you’re talking about. So, I do a lot of reporting for all my columns.”
Jacques worked at the Detroit News for 12 years, where she was a member of the editorial board. She was hired at USA TODAY in 2022. She has written for National Review (online), the Wall Street Journal, Real Clear Politics, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Examiner. She lives in Metro Detroit with her husband, a financial adviser for Edward Jones, whom she met at Hillsdale.
Unlike many journalists at mainstream media outlets, Jacques seems to be getting a kick out of the emerging Washington. Maybe that’s because she is curious. “I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal was being discussed behind closed doors,” she says. “Trump’s other picks are going to get raked over the coals, but overall he’s picking people who are outside the box. They’re not Washington insiders, and they’re going to bring a different perspective to the table. Many in the mainstream media are kind of freaking out—oh these people don’t have the “ qualifications” or the “experience”—as if the people currently in these positions do. You can make the case they’re not doing a good job. The Federal Education Department just failed its third audit in a row. I think Trump learned a lot in his first term and he seems not to be wasting any time in trying to put together his second administration. I’m certainly hopeful to see what happens. I like a lot of his ideas. I don’t like all of them, but I think our country under the Biden-Harris administration was just really going down the wrong path. I am hopeful we can start turning some of those things around.
“Trump certainly is strong on the issue of protecting women’s spaces, whether it’s women’s sports, whether we’re talking prisons. I think the country just resoundingly sent a message that they’re tired of how far progressives have been trying to push the country, that it is not where most people are, and so, I do hope he follows through on these things. I hope Trump overturns what I see as very dangerous changes that the Biden administration made to Title IX by trying to replace sex with gender. I think it’s extremely damaging in terms of turning the whole point of Title IX on its head.”
Given the condition of the mainstream media, would Ingrid Jacques advise ambitious young people to go into journalism?
Unlike many journalists at mainstream media outlets, Jacques seems to be getting a kick out of the emerging Washington. Maybe that’s because she is curious.
“Well, I’m a bit biased,” Jacques replies. “My students were all Hillsdale students, and I always encouraged them to go into journalism. I stay in close touch with the program they have going on because even though it’s a small program, I would strongly encourage them to go into the media, to consider doing what I did, to go into mainstream publications, whether they are doing opinion journalism or news reporting. I think what’s led to this obvious echo chamber in the mainstream media is that so many journalists come from the same journalism schools, the same East Coast elite colleges. They all think the same. And if everybody thinks the same, no one’s challenging that point of view. And then you find yourself in MSNBC’s position, where you thought everyone thought like you, and then suddenly you realize they don’t.”
In a podcast a few years ago conducted for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank in Michigan, Jacques explained she tries to persuade but never to preach in her columns. “I like to reach people who may not agree with me. My hope is that they take the time to read my column or editorial and maybe come away thinking about an issue from a different perspective,” Jacques said. “It is so difficult to really change anyone’s point of view, if not impossible. But if you can at least get someone on a very opposite side to hear you out, and to possibly think about a controversial issue with a little bit more perspective, I consider that a win.”
“I think it’s important that a national audience like ours can go to our pages and see a real variety of points of view. People can seek out a publication or podcast that tells them what they want to hear. I don’t think that’s good for us as a society. The biggest compliments for me are when I hear from readers who will say, you know, ‘Hey, I don’t often agree with you,’ or maybe they don’t ever agree with me, but they’ll still tell me, ‘I learned something from your column and I think about that issue differently now,’ and to me, that’s what it’s all about. We need to be able to talk to each other in this country, and the more siloed we become the worse it is for public debate.”