WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS — Despite making a name for himself inside the beltway as a political reporter, editor and analyst, Wheeling native Chris Stirewalt knows that Patsy’s in Elm Grove is still the place for original Dicarlo’s-style pizza.

Stirewalt has never been afraid to announce his West Virginia roots. It’s that influence, including the lessons he learned during his time as a staff writer for the Wheeling News-Register in the late ’90s, a political editor for the Charleston Daily Mail and West Virginia Media in the 2000s, and later as a political editor for Fox News.

“If our identities are constructs now, I definitely identify as a West Virginian and I think of myself as a West Virginian,” Stirewalt said sitting at the Greenbrier Resort on Friday after speaking on the final day of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s 85th Annual Meeting and Business Summit. This was the third time the chamber has invited Stirewalt to talk about national politics.

“There are people who leave West Virginia and go on in to play national roles who are, you’re surprised to learn later, like, ‘oh, I never knew that,'” Stirewalt continued. “Then there are people who are self-loathing West Virginians and they go on and they talk about how bad everything was back in West Virginia … Every place has its problems and West Virginia is unique in some of its problems, but not in most of them and it is a wonderful place.”

Now, Stirewalt is a contributing editor and weekly columnist for the The Dispatch, a center-right online news outlet focused on public policy and analysis. He is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Stirewalt recently launched a new podcast with Washington Free Beacon Editor in Chief Eliana Johnson called “Ink Stained Wretches,” focused on discussing trends in reporting bad journalism. The author of “Every Man a King: A Short, Colorful History of American Populists,” Stirewalt is working on a new book about the news media.

“Most media criticism is trash and most of it is opinion journalism masquerading as analysis,” Stirewalt said. “Media criticism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. ‘I don’t want to talk about this issue, so I’m going to talk about the coverage of this issue’ … it’s a lazy, cheap and easy way to avoid talking about the real story, because the media is usually not the story.”

During his remarks before the state’s business leaders and elected officials Friday, Stirewalt criticized social media and national news coverage for the political schisms in American politics, the rise of populism, and the eroding national institutions, such as Congress.

“I do believe … that we need a better understanding of the revolution in how we receive information and understand things,” Stirewalt said. “We have become lazy consumers who expect to be cosseted and flattered and reinforced in all of our views. We need to be thinking about that so that we can be better custodians of our birthright as Americans.”

With many elected officials more interested in throwing bombs on social media or TV news hits, Stirewalt pointed to U.S. Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Joe Manchin, 1st District Congressman David McKinley, and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Evan Jenkins as examples of politicians who take their role as public officials seriously.

“There’s a number of people we can say this about who take seriously an important job of being a public official,” Stirewalt said. “We have perniciously terribly weak institutions that people have very low confidence in. And I don’t blame them for having that low confidence … We don’t have enough people who treat the job with respect, who treat the job as something important to do that is real public service.”