Third of a three-part, edited transcript of a Wednesday interview by editors and reporters of The Washington Times with syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, executive producer of HotAir.com:

Mr. Eldridge: On May 17, The Washington Times celebrates its 25th anniversary. What does The Times represent to you as a voracious news consumer, as a person who has built her career commenting on the news?

Mrs. Malkin: Well, first of all, congratulations. It's a remarkable achievement. There's always a lot of backpatting among the blogosphere for being the information revolutionaries, but The Washington Times -- when you talk about founding fathers, especially when you're talking about alternatives to the liberal elite -- and I've been a part of the commentary galaxy at The Washington Times for several years, and I owe a lot in terms of mentorship to the people who've been involved with the editorial and opinion pages.
We mentioned Warren T. Brookes [a columnist for The Times who died in 1991] and he's been a role model for me, and ought to be a role model for many more journalists who are conservative and who, particularly, get into the opinion side. Because I think what he represented for a lot of people was a breakthrough on op-ed pages, of someone who did more than just navel-gaze, he put the investigative work into it, absolutely, and let the numbers speak for themselves. And I think he showed that you could have this hybrid of someone who was an opinion columnist but also a journalist of the first order. And I think that for people in the conservative movement who aspire to be opinion leaders, that to have that training and that background, it's very important.
On the news side, too, The Washington Times has had a major impact on politics, reporting and providing that "fair and balanced" perspective before Fox coined that phrase ...

Mr. McCain: You went to Iraq. You've been a critic of the media coverage. What is the media missing about Iraq?

Mrs. Malkin: Well, part of our motivation -- just to provide context -- was to look into a story that the Associated Press had first reported, around Thanksgiving. And all you have to do is Google "Jamil Hussein" and you know what I'm talking about.

Mr. McCain: Police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Mrs. Malkin: That's right. But I think that what part of our journey showed was that you don't have to be some deep-pocketed, credentialed-by-the-journalistic-Sorbonne member of the media to go over there and see for yourself what exactly is happening there. And I think we have just gotten so sick of the daily death toll, IED explosion of the day type reporting, that we have used both our sites, both my site and Hot Air, to provide that balance.
I think that the embed program is such a great innovation. More citizen-journalists should use it. ... Jeff Emanuel of RedState is over there. We've seen a lot more bloggers on the right than on the left go over there. There are very few obstacles to approaching MNFI and applying for an embed and getting over there, but all these people who use the "chickenhawk" argument on the left, I haven't seen them signing up. You know, they're always sending us e-mails every day, "Why don't you sign up? Why don't you go over there?" Uh, been there.

Mr. Preston: And I did serve in the military.

Mrs. Malkin: Yes, and Bryan was in the Air Force. We would love to go back --

Mr. Preston: Yeah, we sure would.

Mrs. Malkin: For a longer period. But in the interim, I think listening to milbloggers reporting from the front is a far better way of getting informed than, say, listening to what Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson has to say.

Mr. DeBose: Where did you go in Iraq?

Mrs. Malkin: Northwest Baghdad. We were in the Khadamiyah neighborhood, and we embedded on the base where Saddam was hung.

Mr. Preston: About a week before we got there.

Mr. DeBose: The news focus is almost exclusively on Baghdad. And it also appears that is where most of the violence is occurring. But what I don't hear is what's going on -- I mean, Iraq is about the size of California. That's like covering Los Angeles by itself -- as if the other parts of the country don't exist. And I'm trying to find out why news sources are not looking at these other places in the country where, I don't know if everything is fine, but --

Mrs. Malkin: Well, you know, it's that age old impetus of putting -- what bleeds, leads. And what you say of Iraq is true of Baghdad, too. I mean on the day that we got there, the Haifa Street siege was taking place, and our unit came and picked us up in armored Humvees, and we drove right past Haifa Street. And then we drove right into our neighborhood, which was completely pacified. Obviously, we still had to wear helmets and body armor, but we didn't need the [security] contingent that [Arizona Sen. John] McCain got ridiculed for. And you know, we went through the markets, we were on dismounted patrols. They don't follow the curfew there at night.
It's a separate question about how it got pacified, but the fact is there are some safe places in Baghdad. But you rarely hear about them. It's all about wanting to report the bloodiest moments of the day, rather than the boring parts of reconstruction or civilian affairs officers sipping tea.

Mr. Preston: Or giving soccer balls out to kids, that sort of thing. We ran into reporters who looked at the pacified area that we were in and didn't report it. But then he showed up later on in Ghazaliya, which is one of the worst parts of town. Heard a lot of reports there -- brilliant reports, factual as far as we know, but there's a selection bias, just by what he chose to report and what he chose not to report. ...

Mrs. Malkin: And what the critics will say is, "Oh, well, you're just serving as propagandists for the Bush administration, doing all the touchy-feely stories," instead of seeing that that is part of counter-insurgency success. ...

Mr. McCain: You just mentioned your being accused of being a cheerleader for the Bush administration. Immigration -- you have been harshly critical of President Bush's immigration policy. Why?

Mrs. Malkin: Because his policy is open borders, and I think it runs exactly contrary to the lip service he pays to homeland security. And I would say that his tenure has been as bad or possibly worse than Clinton's or anyone's preceding him. And he is vigorously pushing an amnesty that will make the 1986 amnesty look like nothing. He's holding hands with Congressiional Hispanic Caucus and the libertarian open-borders lobbyists who want to see this happen, and apparently he doesn't buy his own rhetoric that homeland security starts with border security.
He goes and does these dog-and-pony shows down at the border that tout drones, and then, at the same time looks the other way where his own Treasury Department allows [illegal aliens to send] billions of dollars of remittances back to Mexico. There's no incentive there for Mexico to improve its economy, for them to improve conditions so people don't have to risk their lives going through the desert to get here to be able to support their families.
And then we haven't even started to talk about the national security implications of granting another mass amnesty. We already know for a fact that there have been dozens of al-Qaeda operatives who've been able to stay in this country over the last several years, some of whom took advantage of these very kind of amnesty programs -- we talked about this when you interviewed me for "Invasion." Things have only gotten worse now. When was that -- 2002? Five years ago? ...

Mr. Eldridge: Is there a conservative movement in America and what is it, and who leads it?

Mrs. Malkin: I don't know that there is any one, unitary movement. I certainly know different niche movements. There's certainly a grassroots immigration-enforcement movement. I mean, I think we have a narrow view when we think of, well, which Washington groups and leaders are leading this movement, but out in the Southwest, for example, you have a lot of these immigration-enforcement activists who don't have puppet strings from Washington.
But a lot of people don't remember, in that last mid-term election, there were four anti-illegal immigration initiatives that passed overwhelmingly in Arizona, and those are certainly ignored by the open-borders editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, who claimed that the mid-term elections were a rebuke of immigration enforcement. ... I guess in the rarefied Manhattan air of the Wall Street Journal offices, they have a very funny view of what the elections were all about. ...
There's one other niche movement that I want to talk about that has been electorally successful, and that's sort of been under the radar screen, and that's Ward Connerly and the civil rights initiatives. Almost nobody paid attention to over the last week, he launched four more of these initiatives. And remember even while ... the Republicans got spanked during the mid-terms, but he did fabulously. He was rebuked by the Michigan Republicans, remember --

Mr. DeBose: Yeah, he's getting no support anywhere.

Mrs. Malkin: Except for the vast majority of voters, everytime these initiatives go on the ballot.

Mr. Preston: Amazing how that works.

Mrs. Malkin: Yeah, I was in California when he did the first one and I was in Washington [state] when he did Initiative 200, and I worked for the Seattle Times at the time. And Frank Blethen, who's the publisher of that paper -- a total left-wing[er], who had thrown everything against that -- the entire liberal establishment and the corporate establishment opposed that thing and it still won. And that's in far-left Seattle, it won. And [Mr. Connerly] will win again, and he'll be rebuked again by the Republicans, and they will not learn.

Mr. DeBose: On [California Proposition] 209, the only credible argument against it, which was never argued, was that it hurt white women more than it did anyone else. And if no one is going to argue about that, why is it then that Republicans don't want to touch that issue?

Mrs. Malkin: Because they're cowards. They're moral cowards. They don't want to be seen as going against the race mongers on the left, and they didn't want to be in the battlefield and slog it out. And also, I think, they didn't believe in it. ...
I mean, it's so much easier just to pay off these affirmative action groups than to fight on principle. But obviously, Ward Connerly has the backing of the grassroots conservative movement. ... Obviously, he appeals to the majority of the people. ...

Mr. McCain: Rush Limbaugh has said that, if he started talking about media bias, he'd never talk about anything but media bias. [...] Is it ever going to change?

Mrs. Malkin: I guess I just don't have that kind of defeatist attitude. You know, the great thing about having a blog -- or two blogs, for that matter, both text and video -- is that you can keep at it, and you have a limitless amount of space to expose both sins of omission and sins of commission. And we are having successes, and it's not just Rathergate. Everyone keeps going back to that focal point.
But just look at last year and the entire right-side of the blogosphere's work on the "fauxtography" scandal during Israel's Hezbollah conflict -- it had a major impact. Every time I look at that "picture kill" on screen shot, I think, "Yeah, you're right we had an effect on that. You're right we should keep doing that, and keep hammering at it, because it does make a difference."
I don't like this idea of people who roll their eyes and say, "Oh, why do you complain about media bias?" Because how we get our information, and what is said, particularly about the war, is so important. And we saw the impact that that has on those soldiers in the field. And it's not just a matter of parlor games or doing it because it's some sort of vacuous intellectual exercise -- you know, it has an impact on people's lives.

Mr. Preston: It's not just a "gotcha" game.

Mrs. Malkin: And I think that drives a lot of what we do at Hot Air, in particular.

Mr. Preston: Like that AP story, where we stood in front of the mosque that the AP said had been blown up. ... Actually, the most important part of the story, which kind of got lost in everything, was that story was a smear of the Iraqi army. And we're trying to get the Iraqi army to stand up and work on its own, and to be able to function. And that story smeared the Iraqi army by alleging that they stood by while some Shia burned some Sunni -- dragged him out of a mosque and burned him. That didn't happen. The Iraqi army actually did what it's supposed to do in that incident. So you have to combat this stuff.

Mr. McCain: OK, final question. A few weeks ago, Matt Drudge, on his radio show, took kind of a shot at you. Is there some kind of a feud between Malkin and Drudge? Is there something going on there that inquiring minds should know about?

Mrs. Malkin: Here's how I'm going to respond, OK? We love what we do at Hot Air. We have a lot of fun doing it. I think that's obvious to our readers, our viewers, and we've had a lot of amazing stories that we've covered over the last year.
I'm very fortunate to have the team I work with and Bryan, in particular, and I have been everywhere from the Gathering of Eagles march to interviewing Doolittle's Raid survivors to going to Iraq to filming cheerleader routines in your backyard. And guess what? We're providing something that people want to see.
And if there are detractors who have a problem with that, guess what? They don't have to click on Hot Air and they certainly don't have to click on the "play" button.