Thats what I wanted to know. Who is this up and coming mega talent not only in the blogoshpere but in the MSM world of political punditry and cultural commentary?

How is somebody this young this good this soon?

Ham began at Hugh Hewitt’s blog late last year but that wasn’t her introduction to blogs, or journalism. You might say she was born to it. In our interview Mary Katharine tells us where she came from and how she got here and where she got her great sense of humor.

TUA: Lets start with some background stuff.

MKH: ok

TUA:Your Townhal.com bio says you were a sports and feature reporter at a small newspaper in North Carolina for two years. Are you a sports fan?

MKH: Yes I am a huge sports fan.

TUA: Whats your favorite sport or sports?

MKH: College Football and College Basketball. I grew up in Durham so I was a duke fan. So I got the ACC growing up. And then I went to Georgia for college so.

TUA: Bulldogs

MKH: SEC football. So I got the best of both worlds.

TUA: Are you a pro football fan at all?

MKH: A little bit not as much. In the past couple of years I’ve gotten into it.

TUA: A Steelers Fan by any chance?

MKH: Not a big Steelers fan but I did go to Pittsburgh with some Steelers fans for the Super bowl this year and that was quite an experience. We went to this sports bar there. It was a great time.

TUA: But definitely not a Cleveland Browns though?

MKH: no

TUA: And from the newspaper you went to work for the Heritage Foundation as editor of their insider magazine?

MKH: it goes to about 5,000 policy wonks basically. And it’s just a bunch of policy papers and commentary on various things. It covers all kinds of things. But it went to all the state think tanks and that kind of thing. And so I would pick the stories for that and lay it out and all that fun stuff.

TUA: And then from there you went to the Townhall.com?

MKH: Yes

TUA: Now your bio says you are a former senior writer and associate editor but you still write for them right?

MKH: Yes, well what happened was I worked for Townhall.com I got hired away by Salem Communications to work on another conservative website, and then that conservative website never came into being because Salem bought Townhall.com so now I am back at Townhall.com.

TUA: Gotcha

MKH: It’s all very complicated nobody understands it but me.

TUA: Well I was going to ask you about that whole thing. This merger or Salem buying Townhall.com, is that going to be the new conservative juggernaut?

MKH: Yeah I really think it is. It has the potential to be really huge. What we are doing is, we’ve got the town hall basis of a million and a half uniques a month something like that. And then the five Salem hosts were going to bring on to Townhall.com. So Hugh Hewitt will be in the future at Hughhewitt.townhall.com. It will just redirect you wont have to do anything special but it will be under the same umbrella, and all of those five Salem Hosts have six to nine millions listeners a week.

TUA: Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh and who are the other ones?

MKH: It’s Medved, Prager, Hugh, Gallagher, and Bennet

TUA: Ok

MKH: and so they have six to nine millions listeners a week who they are going to be pushing to Townhall.com to do activism

TUA: amazing.

MKH: and so we will have user blogs, and ways to get in touch with Senators, and make your own newsletter, all of the sort of action center items you had on George W. Bush.com because the guy who is building this was his director of E-campaigns.

TUA: and all of those radio hosts will also be contributing original content to that site as well.

MKH: Yes it’s exciting. We are pumped about it.

TUA: When is this all going to start happening?

MKH: soon. I can’t give an exact date yet but they are working on it now.

TUA: So it’s just around the corner then?

MKH: Right.

TUA: Now Townhall.com is that where you met Hugh and is that how you ended up writing for his blog back in 2005?

MKH: Well when I get hired away from Townhall.com when I got hired by Salem, they were building this site so I didn’t have anywhere to write, and since Hugh works for Salem he said just let her write for me.

TUA: ohhh I was reading something on PoliPundit where Lorie Byrd was talking about this new site you were building so it all makes sense now.

MKH: Right that’s what we were doing, so now it’s all going to be combined now which I think is a good move for everyone.

TUA: And you were named blogger rookie of the year in 05?

MKH: Yes by a committee of one, by Hugh himself but to be fair he did write the book on blogging so I guess that’s legit. I think it’s more of an honorary term.

Both laughing

TUA: How would you compare the way you blog vs. the way you wrote for the newspaper?

MKH: I think a lot of the reason I gravitated towards sports is that you can have some fun with it. You can write in your own voice people aren’t worried about you know; I worked in a very small town there was only one high school so it didn’t matter if you were rooting for the team. You didn’t have an obligation to be very dry and objective when you were doing sports in this little town and I just loved it. And I loved that I could cut loose a little bit and make some jokes and that kind of thing. I also did some humor columns, and political columns as well, but that’s why I really enjoyed sports and that’s why I think I migrated over to blogs I think successfully because they really give you a chance to be yourself and have your own voice and its so much more fun that writing a hard news story. There are times when that’s necessary on a blog but its just fun to be able to be your self and not worry about it.

TUA: So it’s a much more free format blogging than vs. hard news in an MSM setting at least.

MKH: I think so and a lot of you know what a lot of obviously liberal journalists run in to ; is that they do have these beliefs and they are not acknowledging them where as when I am writing about the news at least I’m telling you listen this is where I stand. So if it colors the way I am covering this you will know up front this is where this comes from. I think that’s important.That’s one of the things that pushed me to get out of newspapers was the whole; It felt dishonest to me because everyone was acting as if there was no slant at all in my newsroom but at the same time I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was like if I am the only conservative you guys have ever met then there’s a problem.

TUA: So even at your small town newspaper it was apparent to you that you were the only conservative person there.

MKH: well I know I wasn’t the only conservative at that paper, but I was the only sort of out spoken one where on the other side there was a good handful of outspoken liberal activists. There were the old school people who had been at the paper a long time who were either Republicans or conservative Democrats but they didn’t get in to the politics too much. So I was the only one fighting with my managing editor about it.

TUA: This is interesting what you’re saying because I was thinking this is a small town paper and it’s in North Carolina so maybe you know it’s a little more conservative than your typical newspaper. Conservatism and journalism don’t really go together that well, what made you want to be a journalist and when did you say I want to do that for a living or when I grow up?

MKH: My dad was a career newspaper man. He was the managing editor of the local paper for twenty years while I was growing up. I actually just wrote a column about this today but he was in a cross town newspaper battle. I am from Durham, and so it was the Durham Herald Sun and the Raleigh News Observer. The News Observer was bigger and always wanted to come into Durham and steal their turf. So my dad was the managing editor during this whole battle and I wasn’t positive that was what I wanted to do but I knew the only thing I could really do was write and I knew that from a young age; so I watched him and I was kind of interested in how he ran this battle and made specific marketing decisions, and decisions about news coverage and I watched the two papers become so much phenomenally better competing with each other and that was just fascinating to me. So I went to Georgia and I did journalism school largely because I knew I could get out in four years and actually get a job. So I wasn’t positive I wanted to do it. I tried a little stint in book editing for a while as an intern and found it to be ridiculously boring.

TUA: as boring as it sounds?

MKH: laughing YES, and so I interviewed with a company that owns community newspapers all over the place they were based in Athens, I interviewed with them they put down a map and I said, I want to go to this tiny town in North Carolina. That looks good. So that’s how I ended up there, but it took some major soul searching to get out of newspapers that was my big hurdle. I had been so attached to them from such a young age.

TUA: So I take it then you grew up a conservative then?

MKH: My parents weren’t conservative growing up, although they weren’t super liberal, they didn’t become conservative until probably the second Clinton term and my dads a blogger so he might blog and correct me on that. But somewhere in the 90s right there, I guess I was about 14 or 15 and that will tell you how old I am (laughing) when I noticed he was listening to Rush Limbaugh and I was kind of at first, my first thought was like I don’t know about this guy and my dad said just listen for a little while keep an open mind. But I had started having politically conservative thoughts much much earlier because my brothers and I all went to inner city public schools and when you see social programs up close and personal like that it’s very very important that they hurt the very people they are trying to help. So I think oddly enough I became a fiscal conservative without really knowing it at a very young age or started having those thoughts. It was just a progression after my parents started looking at other stuff. By high school I was pretty full fledged.

TUA: It’s interesting that you say that, I am still a registered Democrat myself. I was born a Democrat, but I think a lot of younger people see; especially school is a place where you see how bureaucracy doesn’t work and how these big ideas that modern liberalism sells us just don’t work.

MKH: My brothers and I were just never wedded to that kind of thing. We are still the only conservatives in our neighborhood but we learned to think for ourselves that way (laughing)

TUA: Now you mentioned earlier how you liked doing sports because it gave you freedom to inject your sense of humor you have a great sense of humor.

MKH: Thank you very much.

TUA: Your finding Vanilla coke on the internet post was awesome. Where did you get your sense of humor?

MKH: Oh gosh, I guess it just comes from my family. My dad has always been a funny guy and my little brother is funnier than I am. He’s ridiculous. I am very lucky to have a very stable wonderful loving family. My parents are together, and my two little brothers are great. They are 23 and 21 and we all just hang out together and have the greatest time. And I don’t know I was just born of that somewhere along the way.

TUA: I mentioned in my initial email to you, you almost seem too hip to be a conservative. A couple of months ago you blogged about going to South by Southwest in Austin was that for work or just for fun?

MKH: It was actually for work. My boss is buddies with all these internet innovator kind of folks and they tend to lean left and be more hip, so we went to listen to them and see what they were doing and you know steal ideas when necessary and that kind of thing. So we do that occasionally. We went to the personal democracy forum conference too which was largely lefty and hung out there. But I have always been comfortable in those situations because I’m from a college town and I grew up with college professor’s children, so all of my friends are liberals. So I don’t have too much trouble hanging out with them.

TUA: Again I go back to that pool story earlier. People who meet you just assume you are a liberal and are surprised when they find out your not.

**Editors Note** before we officially began the interview I asked her about something she had wrote in 2004.

MKH: Yes, they generally are. If you google me there is something its World of Crap that picks on me so bad.

TUA: I read it yeah.

MKH: yeah the most picked on person in America?

TUA: yeah.

MKH: This is because I hang out with a much higher concentration of super liberals than most conservatives do. I’m in a very blue section and I have lots of blue friends and a lot of people who just assume, and I think a lot of them are very surprised how nasty they can be. When they make comments and don’t realize I’m a conservative, and then they realize oh I’m actually insulting somebody who’s standing right here? You can see it they get a little concerned about how mean they had just been because they think they are compassionate but anyway I just try to be nice and carry the banner and do it politely.

TUA: Have you ever converted any of your liberal friends.

MKH: I think on certain issues I have gained ground, most of my friends their parents are super libs and they have been thinking about this stuff a certain way forever but I think on certain issues I have had some influence. Actually years ago probably I was thirteen or fourteen or so and we were at my friends moms dinner table and she had guests over, and she was talking to us about how you need to shop at the local book store because its important to support them and not the big book store; and my friend who had been hanging out with me for a long time said to her mom well why would you shop at the little bookstore when its more expensive and you can get everything you need at the big one?And her mom gasped. And I knew she knew it was me.

TUA: you aren’t allowed to hang out with that Ham kid anymore.

MKH: I know I know. We do our best my brothers and I. I am very kind about it. I just try and surprise people because a lot of them meet me, a lot of my friends who have known me for a long time have this idea that I’m a weird conservative; that the rest of them are all psycho and Mary Katharine’s just nice.

TUA: Right you’re the normal one.

MKH: right the only one exactly and I’m trying to sort of bring them around help them understand there are a lot of nice people out there.

TUA: You know I have to say it; I used to think that way. Conservatives are evil. And now in my work I am surrounded by conservative people and they are hard working, nice, decent people.

MKH: I just try to have fun with it. I love all of them they are great friends, and we have good discussions usually. So I have a lot of fun with it and I don’t get bitter about it or anything. I know there are plenty of liberals out there who just happen to disagree with me on philosophy and that’s ok.

TUA: Hugh brought this up during our infamous interview about how he was 50, and I’m turning 40 this year, and you’re in your twenties still right?

MKH: Yes

TUA: He was saying how each generation brings about a different world view with it. Do you think you represent a younger cool group of conservatives?

MKH: I’m not sure. I think there is some of that. I think the term south park conservative is overused and I’m not exactly that. I’m an interesting mix because I was a fiscal conservative before I became a Christian. When I became a Christian I became more socially conservative, but my heart is really in the fiscal stuff so that’s sort of a weird combination. As far as hipper stuff goes; I am always trying to encourage conservatives who are a little squeamish about things like South Park or other ways to get out messages that we shouldn’t turn our nose up at everything. I mean watching South Park with my liberal friends, a lot of times they don’t even know that these messages are conservative and it’s these great sort of you know against the whole multi culturalism thing. South Park does it very cleverly.

TUA: their team America movie was great.

MKH: It was classic to leave the theatre with a bunch of liberals after that and they were taken aback and didn’t understand. I think might have been making fun of us. But yeah I think its important not to entirely disregard different ways like that new ways hipper ways of getting messages out like that.

TUA: You mentioned something that’s very interesting to me. One of the things that comes from the left and I try to separate leftism from liberalism is this fear of Christians, and they are always trying to convince us that Christians want to legalize their morality. What you touched on here and I’m just thinking as you said it maybe this younger generation of Christian conservatives are more willing to not pass laws about morality does that make any sense?

MKH: Yeah I think in my experience working at Townhall.com, and working at Heritage, and those may be weird places to test this sort of thing because its not exactly your average politico that’s hanging out in those sort of places but a lot of the evangelical Christians that I know are perfectly committed to their religion but they are also like I am not at all wanting the government to deal with that. So yeah I think there is definitely something to that.

TUA: Fred Barnes has this theory of realignment are you familiar with it?

MKH: I am not sure. Restate it for me.

TUA: Well his whole point is that the last decade and a half or so is proof that the country is becoming more conservative and more Republican and that is going to continue and he predicts that even with a hiccup here and there we are going to see a good twenty or thirty years of conservative Republican governance. Would you agree with that?

MKH: I think intellectually I agree with that. It’s hard for me to believe it because I have lived in Durham and D.C. So I always feel like I am fighting this, I get discouraged occasionally luckily I’m young and naturally optimistic but it’s easy to think we are fighting a loosing battle here. You know everything in the government is rigged to make it bigger, the public education teaches all the left doctrine, my mother still works in public schools so she is always struggling against that. So its easy to get sort of confused about what the actual numbers are and I tend to believe Fred Barnes or Barone who say Oh no really there really are people out there who are like me, So I think that’s probably true. Especially I think from what I have seen growing up even in a liberal community there are a lot of kids whose parents got divorced who therefore put a lot more stock marriage and want to make things work for them, and who knows if that will pan out but those sort of traditional values that were sort of thrown off by their parents even in the very liberal kids I have seen them sort of think twice about that.

TUA: I absolutely agree. I have a saying that the hippies ruined the country. Now last thing I want to ask you about a piece you put up today on Haditha and you had three corrections that the Media have made on this story and a couple of them are Time Magazine and maybe all three of them.

MKH: right

TUA: first the claim that this Hamarabi Human rights group was affiliated with Human Rights Watch and they are not.

MKH: Right

TUA: Second that the most damning piece of evidence is supposedly a photo that a marine took and now they can’t confirm exists. They have no first hand knowledge of this.

MKH: Apparently the photo exists but the marine they spoke to had no knowledge of what exactly was in it. Their statement had been that there was a photo of people praying and a marine standing over them shooting them which seems like a lot of context to put in one camera phone; but that was the claim and that’s pretty out there to find out that the marine in fact had no idea what the actual photographic evidence was. He just knew that there was some.

TUA: and the third major correction is the source of this supposed incriminating video that didn’t surface until four months later from a “budding journalism student” is actually some 40 year old guy who is also the founder of the human rights group.

MKH: Right

TUA: now there is something I picked up on this story I would like to ask you about.

MKH: Ok

TUA: I don’t know if you are aware of this but there is another reporter who is covering this story for Reuters who has the same last name as the guy who founded this human rights group and also took the video. Are you aware of this?

MKH: really? No that’s interesting.

TUA: and so this journalist Al Mashadani was arrested for a five month period because they thought he was involved with the insurgents. And then Reuters had a story that came out November 20th 2005 the day after Haditha and this is one of the things they story says:

A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.
He says the town has been virtually shut down for the past two days as US and Iraqi forces try to impose order.

Now they never named that camera man and the report doesn’t have a byline so we don’t know who wrote the piece. Sweetness and Light has been leading the research on this and she has supposed that the journalist covering the story for Reuters now Al Mashadani is the un named camera man but no one has confirmed this with Reuters.

Shouldn’t someone ask Reuters who is this un named camera man in the article? Did he take any photos that day?

So I’m curious in your journalistic opinion if this has value or not.

MKH: yeah that’s definitely interesting.

TUA: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
MKH: No Problem I enjoyed it.End of interview….. ahhh Wait. Mary Katharine remembers something as we are saying good bye.

MKH: You know what I forgot to tell you bout the sense of humor, I forgot to tell you this part. I know exactly where it came from. When I was seven my teeth grew in at about a 45 degree angle to the ground. My front four teeth and I could not close my mouth until I was 17 years old after four years of braces and in the intervening time no one could take me seriously with teeth like that so you just had to joke. And I am not exaggerating; I could close my mouth until I was 17. My dad always said the upside was I could eat Corn on the cob through a picket fence. He’s a loving father.

***End of interview***

I agree with her liberal friends. Mary Katharine is just nice,very talented, and funny. It’s a good thing that she got her teeth fixed because people are taking Ham seriously now. She definitely has a bright and very long career ahead of her.