Let's build a new media together
Truth is under attack. Let's defend it
You’d think Elon Musk would be busy, seeing as he just bought himself a presidency.Â
But no. Turns out that he’s got plenty of free time to spend harassing yours truly on X.
Intimidation and ridicule are on the rise as these loud and insecure voices are emboldened, and it’s why this newsletter is more important than ever. If you’ve been relying on social media for news and commentary, you might want to rethink that. Who knows what’s going to happen with X, Facebook, Threads, and the like, as those platforms either turn to propaganda or capitulate and suppress or check out of the most important conversations altogether.
We need to come together and build, as David Sirota at The Lever puts it, the world that comes after billionaire media — and that’s a world of independent spaces like this one, calling it as they see it with the direct support of the people they’re speaking not just to, but with. Some of those spaces speak with one voice, bringing you strong opinions you won’t hear anywhere else; some will work like the newsrooms of the past, doing the critical investigative journalism that local papers in crisis can no longer fund and that major news organizations are often unwilling to risk.
This is the time for a new media — not new by virtue of whether it lives online or in print, but new by virtue of rejecting the mistakes of the past, rejecting the view from nowhere, rejecting the capitulation to power in the misguided pursuit of access, or balance, or what have you. It is time for a new approach, one that doesn’t take the audience for granted, one that meets people where they are, one that speaks truth to power in a way that connects to the lives that readers, viewers, and listeners live.
Yascha Mounk over at Persuasion gets at something important here:
[I]t’s high time to get over our injured pride. For too long, liberals have been the staid and sensible defenders of the status quo. But we no longer constitute the establishment or control the status quo. So let’s embrace the virtue of being outsiders. Let’s argue for our ideas with wit and creativity, with joyous verve and a spirit of irreverence.
If the forces arguing for truth are in the wilderness, so be it.
We’ve always risen to the challenge of telling it like it is.
Whether that’s demanding that a president rise to the occasion — or pass the torch.
Or calling attention to the roiling tensions among American men, rooted in our failure to manage the seismic changes in identity wrought by the progress we’ve made on race and gender.
Or speaking to the dangers of by-the-numbers political calculation that sucked the joy out of the Harris campaign Â
It’s what we’ve always done, and it’s what we plan to do in the years ahead — regardless of any unsolicited medical advice we receive from Elon Musk.
This space is and will remain a space where we listen and we think together, and we’re not backing down. We’re not going to stop telling the truth as we see it, the haters be damned. Come at us all you want, Elon.
So today I want to ask you if you’re with us. If you can, become a subscriber today and support this new incarnation of media. There are no algorithms involved in the making of this newsletter. It’s for you, by us, with a direct, unmediated human bond.
Join us and support the media you want to see. We are so grateful for your support. And, more important, for your readership.