National Review

What you're reading

National Review is a conservative opinion magazine founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., the flagship publication of post-war American conservatism and the institutional home of the fusionist tradition that brought together traditionalists, libertarians, and Cold War anti-communists into a coherent right-of-center movement. It publishes a fortnightly print magazine plus a continuously updated website (NationalReview.com), the Corner group blog, the NR Daily newsletter, and the National Review Institute podcast network including Charles C. W. Cooke and Rich Lowry's regular programs.

The magazine has been the institutional gathering point for movement conservatism across the Goldwater, Reagan, Bush, Tea Party, and post-Trump eras, with editorial leadership currently under Rich Lowry and contributors including Charles C. W. Cooke, Andrew McCarthy, Kevin D. Williamson (until his 2018 departure and 2024 return), Jonah Goldberg (until his 2021 departure to the Dispatch), Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin, and Reihan Salah. Audience is national, skews conservative-intellectual rather than populist-MAGA, and runs from policy professionals and academics to general conservative readers who want long-form right-of-center commentary.

Ownership & funding

National Review Inc. (nonprofit). Funded primarily through nonprofit.

National Review Inc. is structured as a nonprofit, which removes the quarterly-earnings pressure that has driven commercial right-of-center outlets toward populist content optimization. The model relies on subscriptions, donor support through the National Review Institute, and a small ad base, with the donor and reader bases concentrated in traditional-conservative and conservative-intellectual circles. This funding structure preserves the magazine's institutional identity — the willingness to take heterodox positions inside conservatism, including the 2016 "Against Trump" issue — that a commercial model focused on conservative ratings would punish. The trade-off is that the magazine is editorially committed to a particular vision of conservatism, and the donor base reinforces that posture.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places National Review at Right with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

The Right rating reflects National Review's explicit conservative editorial identity, which it has held continuously since 1955 and does not pretend to moderate. Coverage prioritizes coverage gaps the right cares about — judicial appointments and the Federalist Society pipeline, originalism and Supreme Court jurisprudence, religious liberty cases, school choice and education policy, immigration and border enforcement, abortion policy and the post-Dobbs landscape, the administrative state, and foreign policy through a Reaganite anti-authoritarian frame. Framing of the Trump and post-Trump conservative movement is internally contested but mostly skeptical of populism, MAGA personality politics, and economic nationalism in its more aggressive forms.

Where National Review breaks the pattern is its willingness to publish heterodox positions inside conservatism. The 2016 "Against Trump" issue lost the magazine subscribers but established its independence from MAGA. Recent coverage has been adversarial toward Trump on Jan. 6, on election denial, on tariff policy, and on judicial nominees the magazine considered unqualified. The magazine has also covered conservative-movement institutional failures (financial scandals, the Madison Cawthorn-style figures, conservative-foundation governance issues) with documented sourcing. The Mostly Factual rating reflects that NR is a magazine of opinion and reporting mixed — the long-form essays and the news reporting are documented and the corrections process is real, but the opinion columns are advocacy and occasionally include claims that hold up less rigorously than the reported features. The bias is openly declared; readers should treat the columns as opinion.

Editorial vs news side

National Review is an opinion magazine that also publishes news reporting and analysis, and it does not pretend to have a centrist news desk separated from a conservative editorial page. The reported features, legal-analysis pieces, and policy explainers are documented and corrected; the columns and the institutional editorial voice are openly conservative. There is no separate editorial board issuing endorsements at the publication level — the magazine speaks with a unified institutional voice across reporting and commentary. The Right rating applies to the publication as a whole. What you are reading is committed traditional-conservative journalism, and that is the product.

Why we include them in nwsly

Conservative opinion magazine emphasizing traditional / fusionist conservatism.

National Review is the deepest traditional-conservative magazine in American journalism and the institutional home of right-of-center policy and legal analysis that takes the conservative movement seriously on its own terms rather than caricaturing it. nwsly pulls it because it provides documented coverage of judicial appointments, religious-liberty cases, originalist legal theory, and conservative-movement institutional fights that no Center or Lean Left outlet in our lineup covers from inside. The Right rating is unambiguous to readers, the perspective is legible up front, and the factual rigor on reported features is strong. We cite the reporting and analysis, not the daily columns.

Recent nwsly briefs citing National Review

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