The Board of Directors, which operates the company, is composed of nine UW students and three non-voting advisers, including noted First Amendment expert Donald Downs and former Republican congressional candidate John Sharpless.

[5] The Daily Cardinal would later become more moderate in response to pressure from local media,[6] the UW Board of Regents,[7] staff members leaving, declining advertising revenue,[8] and the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s dying down around the country.

After several months of fund-raising, scrounging for desks and typewriters, and renting a walk-up office two blocks from the university's Bascom Hill at 538 State Street, the first issue of The Badger Herald was published on September 10, 1969.

The paper received regional attention and sparked a series of campus protests in 1976 and 1978 by publishing controversial opinion pieces titled, "Mao, Death of a Tyrant", "Top Commie Bites Dust", "Can Africans Rule Themselves?"

The Herald was the first newspaper in the state of Wisconsin to publish the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, Jeff MacNelly, having signed the exclusive area rights from his syndicate in 1976.

[9] In 2005, the short-lived Mendota Beacon attempted to fill the void left by the Herald's leftward shift by providing a conservative voice on campus.

[11] In May 2008, a controversial cartoon of David Horowitz, originally published in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee school newspaper, the UW–M Post, that depicted the conservative writer who is of Jewish-American heritage with a hooked nose, was republished on the front page of The Badger Herald.

The Herald Editor in Chief at the time, Jason Smathers, defended the decision based on the belief that the community was strong enough to see and reject the ad.

[12] After a strong push back from the university community, of which at least 25 percent is Jewish[citation needed], the newspaper said it regretted the pain the decision caused but ultimately kept the ad up for the entirety of its month-long run.

In 1976, when numerous newspapers nationally including the Madison Capital Times declined to run a series of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strips because of their controversial content, The Badger Herald negotiated with the syndicate and was the only paper regionally to print the cartoons.