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Conservative Media Shakeout and Misguided Price Points
I generally read and follow most right-of-center media endeavors, except for those that consistently offer very little (e.g., Heritage Signal, etc.). I have long had a high regard for Jonah Goldberg, usually appreciating his former stance of self-deprecating good humor; I have all of his books, some even autographed. I would have voted for David French for president had he run.
But I do not see the purpose of The Dispatch, Jonah’s new venture with Steve Hayes (former Weekly Standard editor; his book on The Connection is criminally neglected by all of the isolationists out there), and a few others (including David French lured away from National Review). I am not speaking here only as one who believes that the Green Bay Packers are Evil (they are, and Aaron Rodgers is one of the biggest jerks in professional sports; if you know Steve Hayes, you understand why it was necessary for me to point that out about Rodgers and the Packers).
Jonah’s writings are obviously the hoped-for attraction and were, in the past very good, more recently usually OK, except that he seems to have great difficulty finding a column or G-File topic these days that isn’t yet another stale rehash of why Trump is the worst evah. Even for those of us who are not big Trump fans, the broken-record reiteration of the same story, especially when accompanied by shallow “analysis” or simple parroting of the Ben Wittes Lawfare line, gets very old. Very fast. And very tedious.
So, for me, the problem based on what I see so far from The Dispatch, is that I don’t see any compelling value proposition – no space in the market for them to occupy, no value-added that is not there already in multiple places doing the same thing (all too often, drearily repetitive pieces on Bad Trump; Charlie Sykes’ stuff is the worst out there these days) – usually for a lot less or no money. The Dispatch is basically The Bulwark, but at $10 a month. The two operations could be combined with no loss in editorial quality, except that each is run by a different group of otherwise like-minded people who each want to be in charge of her/his own publication.
Why, exactly, would anyone spend $100 a year to read yet another screed against “populism” (Trump) that you read at The Bulwark? If I want to get that steady diet, I can read a special talent like Kevin Williamson (who does roughly the same thing these days). And how is the value offered better than competitors for roughly the same amount of your money, such as the other conservative media organizations, or other non-political competitors for the same pot of money, such as Amazon Prime or Netflix? Ricochet is priced about right, NR Plus when you get the introductory digital subscription for about $59 is fine (incidentally the NR Plus auto-renew at $100 a year is not the prevailing substitution value correct price). Daily Wire is selling Ben Shapiro to his biggest fans at $100 a year; I do not subscribe, Ben is perfectly OK these days, but not to me at that price.
As the industry tries now to backfill a sellable paywall model in the internet media shakeout, conservative media – not just The Dispatch – is guilty of pricing to their perceived revenue need rather than to the market value filling an actual niche. It is like those who after the 2007 financial crisis found their home values underwater and their adjustable mortgage rates increased, so they needed to sell. Lots of people were trying to sell houses that they had unwisely bought at peak prices, and they put them up for sale at prices intended to get them “whole” out of bad mortgages. “I need $500,000, so price this $400,000 home at $525,000.” The market did not cooperate, and the actual prices reverted to pre-bubble vakues, not what would service the debt load.
And, when explaining the mission and positioning for the new media company, Steve Hayes said that the goal was not to be just another place for opinion writing, but to add the all-too-often missing reporting of stories, to add facts, not just viewpoints. So their first move was to add David French from National Review, whose metier is opinion writing, with added analytical pieces on Constitutional law. No shoe-leather reporting there. Then, early-hire Sarah Isgur was a guest on Area 45, the Hoover Institution podcast, and she explained that facts are all out there in this Twitter world of instant reporting, so her most important contribution would be to explain what the facts mean, presumably a la Vox Explainers. No shoe-leather reporting there, in fact, the description was roughly opposite Steve Hayes’ described mission.
Then Declan Garvey visited The Remnant just after the Horowitz Report was released, and a) he had not read it, so b) he and Jonah quoted David French, who seemed to have gotten his spin from reading the NYT – “There was no bias in the FBI, so there was a legitimate reason to run the investigation (and deceive the FISA court to get spy warrants looking anywhere possible for something to verify Steele).” Unlike Byron York, he apparently never got around to reading past the first paragraph of the report itself, nor has he, as far as I can see, acknowledged Horowitz’s Congressional testimony, which substantively contradicts virtually every statement or assumption that Schiff and French and Lawfare have relied on for the last two years.
David says roughly the same thing in every single column in a less entertaining style. His “legal analysis” of the Ukraine issue (published on 12/5/2019 in his newsletter) reads like Andrew Weissmann wrote it, not an allegedly fair-minded lawyer:
I’ve made my position on the House impeachment inquiry quite clear. It’s absolutely impeachable conduct for a president to distort international diplomacy in a strategically vital region of the world to attempt to coerce a desperate, dependent ally into investigating a crackpot conspiracy theory and a domestic political opponent. The president put his own interests above the country—and not in a minor matter. It’s important to set a precedent that such conduct is intolerable.
The statement above simply asserts a conclusion, without support for it, apparently based on the fact that Trump is such an unspeakably horrible person that he must be guilty. This is not reporting, nor is it analysis. It is a set of lazy, bald assertions made based on personal aesthetic distaste. It reflects as little intellectual content and insight as we get from most of Donald Trump’s tweets on policy matters.
Why pay the highest price in conservative media to subscribe to read this?
I think that the market will settle out eventually to the stage where people subscribe to one or two favorite, good value media purveyors at roughly $5 per month each, and use an excellent aggregator for supplemental information. The best of these is probably Real Clear Politics.
Then, after the shakeout is more mature, and the surviving startups have learned the value proposition lesson, someone will create a good value paywall aggregator, where you subscribe to the aggregator for $5 per month, and get a limited number of clicks per month (total for all month perhaps 100 articles including a very few at WSJ, etc.) over and above the two or three free reads now permitted. The administrative model is there already in the way music royalties are handled.
Of course, I could be dead wrong, and The Dispatch could sell a whole bunch of subscriptions at the rates they desire. If so, I will follow the CNN, NYT, and WaPo precedent and pretend that I did not spend the last three years peddling utter nonsense and spoon-fed propaganda, freeing me to be righteously opinionated about everything else.
Published in General
Please define “Trumpkinism.”
Good post, Duane. And you’re right — when it’s just pundits reporting “news” by quoting other pundits, and not bothering to do the actual work of newsgathering, what is the purpose?
There are a lot of organizations in Washington that exist solely to rake in cash from gullible donors, maybe produce a report every now and then to make it look like the actually do something. I’m starting to feel as if this legion of beltway pundits, who produce little of value — unless you value divisiveness — could all disappear tomorrow and nobody would care and few would notice.
Why does that surprise no one here ?
For some one who is “less impressed every time I hear him” I would recommend his talk to a group of California conservatives in exile in Bakersfield CA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgmR_5Hi2fw
Wisdom based on experience.
Fascinating research. Maybe these foundations can claim to be bi-partisan by occasionally throwing at pittance (to them, lifeblood to the recipients) at their favorite “conservative” thinkers.
What puzzles me is Bill’s choice of name for his 501(c)(4), Defending Democracy Together (DDT). Sounds toxic! Wasn’t he afraid the left would recoil at funding a group that sounds like a banned insecticide? Sure DDT saved half a billion lives, but ideas that big and edgy also get you banned by the Stockholm Convention. What if Kristol wants to resume his famous conservative cruises? I don’t think a “First Annual DDT Cruise” would pass muster in the most desirable EU ports.
The variety of voices here on Ricochet is why it is my dominant source. Whether or not I agree with the writers at The Dispatch, or TownHall, or National Review, each has a rather limited number of writers from an even more limited scope of backgrounds and current life experiences. Here we get input from dozens of people who live lives completely different from one another and come from different backgrounds.
Thoughts from three or four minds alone, even if they are the most brilliant minds around, is not worth $80 or $100 per year to me.
I find it interesting that Kristie ( my auto fill does this every time, it’s not worth changing anymore) named his publication a synonym for one of his seminal objections to Trump’s policies… a wall.
DrewInWisconsin, Oaf (View Comment):
I really can’t justify spending any more money on political punditry than my Ricochet expenses. (And hey, with GLoP we get some Goldberg here as well.)
I agree there is a distinction between The Bulwark and more extreme NeverTrumpers and The Dispatch. I am as disappointed as anyone at some of the changes in Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes, not to mention the Rubin’s and the Boot’s still claiming to be conservatives.
I wanted to add this comment because I don’t want to put words in Jonah’s mouth or provide a distraction to allow his ideological opponents to focus on instead of his real arguments: he may have said his opposition to Trump has cost him over a million dollars or something like that – not Millions! and Billions! of dollars. I still think if he were primarily in it for the money he would have gone full Seb Gorka and sold Trump inspired hemorrhoid cremes and such.
It’s nice when you can make up your own definition of intellectual and decide who is and is not to prove your point that no intellectual would support Trump. In intellectual land, we call that tautological.
I should have read ahead before posting that last. But, hey, we’re just calling what we see.
I don’t believe that.
I’m continually surprised that people spend money on The Bulwark or The Dispatch at all. What do they offer that you can’t find for free elsewhere on the net? At least Ricochet has forums where I can chat with people and contribute my own screeds. If Ricochet just had columnists telling me what to think and no subscriber participation, I wouldn’t spend money here either.
The Punditry Bubble is due to burst.
And besides, they don’t make intellectuals like they used to. I don’t really think any of the NTers is up there with Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Maybe it’s exuberant hyperbole or alternative facts.
I like the way you put it better. I think that’s what the intellectuals in Canada call an ‘own 🥅”
My basic standard is “Tell me something I don’t know and give me reasons why I should believe it.” Not “this is what I think and you should believe it because of who I am.” The former is not all that difficult to accomplish (e.g., Andrew McCarthy) and actually can exist across the political spectrum.
I don’t believe it either, but maybe he’s learning something from the master. Better use an obvious exaggeration than to feign humility, (Rush Limbaugh has been doing that for years and only lefties were annoyed) or say, like his preferred candidate “I shouldn’t be penalized just because I happen to have the same name”, by guess who.
I suspect that first what is meant is “Public Intellectual.” There are not so many Thomas Sowells or Charles Krauthammers out there. There never have been. Most of our other public intellectuals may be relatively intelligent and well-educated men, but they are hardly in the same league. I can probably find more private intellectuals on Ricochet than I can name public intellectuals, though. And none of them are automatically on one side or the other of any point without a great deal of thought. Those who accuse others of being intellectually lacking because they are for or against one man in politics are probably not among the intellectuals.
I never quite got the media hysteria over “alternative facts.” That used to be called a “debate” or “presenting a different perspective.” Maybe that was the problem.
If I was young enough, I’d start a band called Exuberant Hyberbole.
Then he’s exactly like Trump. I love it.
Never too old. Do you need a recorder player?
I certainly have no problem conferring the title on Bill Kristol’s parents, but I’m not so sure about its hereditary aspects.
I was surprised to see the absence of “original reporting” in the debut of the Dispatch. Hiring David French was a horrific mistake. If your target audience is right of center, having two prominent Never-Trumpers as your lead writers is a branding and thus a marketing issue.
Useful and — since it confirms my own views — perspicacious summary. Thank you.
I’d still like to see a conservative portal, a single-fee entree into a web of paywalled conservative sites. Because I don’t think the five dollars here and five dollars there approach works well. (For example, I’m a digital subscriber to Commentary, but I rarely think to read it. I don’t think I’d want to subscribe to another conservative site and forget to read that as well, and that’s likely what would happen. Of course, that’s just me.)
Perhaps some of them were already quite far along on that road to ruin…
Yes. This is what I call hostile (mis)interpretation.
They know they are doing it. It’s just too delicious to give up. The right does it too, although not as much. Who actually believes that Obama thought there were 57 states? He simply misspoke and I always lost respect when someone ( Hannity?) repeated that.
As to band names, I like Cognitive Dissidents
Heres a really good one.
Appearing Thursday Night
No Cover Charge
For some reason it hasn’t been used.
There used to be a Newfie duo called “Free Beer.”
I am commenting here only to endorse the concept of “wifeporn”. Nothing whatever can top or compete with the erotic appeal of a lovely wife, especially one of many years (>45 in our case) and mature demeanor. And plenny good-lookin’ and gropable. She announced two nights ago that she was going to give up eating ice cream because she was up all the way to 106 pounds….