Beverly Congdon is giving a speech to the Women's Republican Club in Porterville about her personal experiences as an opinionated teen. She believes she is in the "political minority" of her generation as a young Republican.

I strived to have my voice heard by a wider audience, so I started a political club my junior year at Porterville High School, with members from Granite Hills High School as well. As many of you shouldn’t be surprised to hear, the membership was small—about 20 members, with only 12 active members.  We spent so much time fundraising, that it was seldom that we ever got to debate politics.  We did, however, raise about $2,000 to visit our state capital and attend a weekend convention held by the organization Junior State of America.  At the convention, hundreds of students from across California participated in a mock Congress event.  My club members and I learned the inner workings of the American political system.  I proudly noticed all the club members began to believe that politics could be fun after all.  Before it seemed that I was the only one who deemed politics as an enjoyable subject, rather than just an unavoidable one. 

Meanwhile, my junior year I attended Porterville High School with my 6 and 7 period at Granite Hills High School due to a conflict in my schedule of classes.  My AP English teacher at Granite Hills, Mr. Hackett, assigned our class to write opinion essays.  Soon after, he asked me to contribute my editorials to the school’s newspaper, the Grizzly Gazette.  I was a regular columnist for “The Ben and Bev Show” in which every other week I wrote about a particular issue with my own conservative convictions, while my classmate Ben wrote from the liberal perspective. I discovered the Grizzly Gazette was the perfect outlet for y opinions. I spoke to a much wider audience and received a lot of feedback from the readers of the Gazette.  Week after week I was obsessed with crafting and polishing my editorials. 

After attending the National Scholastic Press Association convention in April of last year at Denver, Colorado, the Gazette made their mark.  The Grizzly Gazette competed with elite schools from across the nation, such as Palo Alto High School located near Stanford University and Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois, located on the campus of the University of Illinois.  In the end, we were named as one of the top three high school newspapers in the nation.  For the high school level, the award is equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. After this, I decided it was easier for me to leave my friends at Porterville High than it was for me to leave Granite Hills and the Grizzly Gazette.  The newspaper and its production had become too important to me.  It is this reason why I transferred to Granite Hills my senior year. 

I am currently the Opinion Page editor for the Gazette.  We are in the middle of the NSPA contest to be named an Online Pacemaker Winner. I urge all of you to visit the paper to read all the student opinions and respond. 

Not only is it rare that you come across an opinionated teenager, but it is even more infrequent that you will find one to take the time to write an intelligent piece on a particular issue outlining their opinion.  These kids need encouragement from our community.  As the Women’s Republican club, I also urge you to respond to student editorials and help them see both sides of the debate.  The conservative side.  Some students are innocently naive about the conservative ideology, and the real facts about world issues such as the War on Terror and Embryonic Stem Cell Research. 

I must admit I am in the political minority of my generation.  It’s extremely rare to find a conservative teen my age that is actually eager to defend his/her positions.  I think this is directly because our mainstream media is slanted, no not slanted, distorted, towards the left.  They are constantly violating their own journalism code of ethics by reporting selectively, or with their own analysis.  Reporters are not supposed to provide their own analysis of events—that is for editorialists to do.  Yet professional newspapers and news stations such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN constantly report in a way which paints a poor picture of conservative ideologists, or of something they support.  For example, news corporations such as these never forget to report the deaths of troops in Iraq.  I believe the reports of these deaths were not out of honor for the troops, but instead to manipulate public opinion into thinking Iraq is a miserable failure.  I believe this to be their intention simply because when the troop surge proved to drastically improve the situation in Iraq, all became silent on the mainstream media front.  In contrast, the death toll under Clinton’s administration, 4,417 soldiers, exceeds the death toll in Iraq from 2003 to today.  But the media doesn’t report that. 

For the better of our country, it is our duty to inform others, especially our youth, about the truth.  Otherwise young Americans will only hear from the mainstream media, and form their opinions the way such news corporations intended. 

So please, please, please look at the Grizzly Gazette and respond to the editorials! I am proud, as are all of you, to consider myself as a young republican woman.  Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you all today.