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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
GDP growth is slowly sinking back to Obama levels and wage growth just sunk <3% for the first time in 2 years. Meanwhile, the deficit was lowered in 4 of the last 5 Obama years……while Trump has increased the deficit in all 4 years (without a major military conflict). So yes, clinging your support for a president on him being an economic puppet master is more statist than conservative and intellectuals typically think bigger than that.
Or at least learn to buy pants.
Or skeptical. Trump appears to be practicing the “5 Whys”. And his chief advisors appear to be answering every WHY with, “Well, it’s complicated.”
Five whys (or 5 whys) is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem.[1] The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question “Why?”. Each answer forms the basis of the next question. The “five” in the name derives from an anecdotal observation on the number of iterations needed to resolve the problem.
Not all problems have a single root cause. If one wishes to uncover multiple root causes, the method must be repeated asking a different sequence of questions each time.
The method provides no hard and fast rules about what lines of questions to explore, or how long to continue the search for additional root causes. Thus, even when the method is closely followed, the outcome still depends upon the knowledge and persistence of the people involved.
That is just demonstrably untrue. 20 alone in 2019, 15 in 2018 and 11 in 2017. (Each year there were additional losses reported as non-combat related.) Already this year we lost Staff Sgt. Ian McLaughlin of Newport News, VA and Pfc. Miguel Villalon of Joliet, IL (both 82nd Airborne) to an IED and it’s still January.
I also disagree with your term “cleanup.” That presumes large scale accomplishment of a stated larger goal. When exactly did we declare victory?
You have no credibility. In this thread, you’ve proven you don’t know what an intellectual is, you don’t know soldiers are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, and don’t seem to care(!) casually asserting falsehoods, and claim here that there’s no “major military conflict” and seem to overlook that Trump allotted billions to re-load our depleted military from years of over-use from Bush and neglect from Obama.
Where do you get your news?
This strikes me as the most cogent explanation of the current political moment I have ever read.
Watching Cruz as a constituent, I’m pretty sure he would have been as in-your-face as Trump, and certainly on energy independence, since the Texas oil people having been among his bigger supporters. Whether or not he could have beaten Hillary is a different question, since he didn’t have a 38-year history in the public eye as Trump had.
And really, Texas would have been OK even with Rubio or Jeb, because its frack zones are on private or state land. It’s the frack zones in New Mexico that were being slowed during the Obama era by the Bureau of Land Management, to where drill permits on federally-owned land were slow-walked, and pipeline projects over-regulated. Rubio and Jeb might have faced the double-standard question there, insofar as why they were against Florida offshore drilling but were OK on drilling all over federal areas of N.M., and might have slow-walked constraining BLM regulators in that state and elsewhere.
Not a particularly spectacular “accomplishment.” It’s still a deficit. Which means the debt is still growing. (The most irritating part of budget debates is the conflation of the words debt and deficit. Clinton left office showing a small budget surplus – which we did not apply to the debt.)
No he didn’t.
The debt increased year-over-year every year of the Clinton Presidency. (He did come within something like $20 billion one year though).
The last time we had a year-over-year decline in the gross national debt was during the Eisenhower Presidency.
Evidently, IED deaths don’t get labeled as battle deaths. Regardless, the number of casualties is lower than the number of cops that die in America. Some jobs are just risky. The current risk is FAR lower than before, so if a leader can’t handle it, its safe to say he’d do worse in more serious times. Trump clearly has major insecurities about being a draft dodger and he lashes out at his military advisers to cover for it.
Doesn’t that mean “oil man” George W Bush should have been far more effective than he was? Do you have convincing-to-me evidence that Cruz, Rubio, or Jeb would have done better than W? Part of the argument here seems to be that “establishment” GOP presidents have done very well at sitting on their hands.
Afghanistan is a lost cause. Everyone can see it.
Cruz is more of bomb-thrower. That’s why he almost lost to Beto — the Bush wing of the state’s GOP has never forgiven him for beating Dewhurst in 2012, and even some in the Trump wing didn’t vote for him in 2018, because they were still irked over his staying in the 2016 race and convention speech.
We elected this “draft dodger” as Commander-in-Chief. The military advisers rank BELOW our President, not above. This is one of the great things about our country. If he indeed dodged the draft he was smart to do so considering how our genius generals were running that war and lying to the American people about it.
I think, at this point, I want a CinC who was smart enough, suspicious enough, irreverent enough to have ‘dodged’ that draft, so he could live on to become President and give these Generals a piece of his mind. Tell me, how many of these Generals saw combat? I bet you a lot of them didn’t and/or were safely leading from behind. To say nothing about the so-called journalists history of brave sacrifice.
And yeah, you seem to be easily fooled by labels. Keep digging!
Yes he did. Again don’t confuse deficit with debt. A deficit is the difference between outlay and income. The debt is the accumulation of those deficits.
Now, how he did it was suspect. Remember the debate over the Social Security “lockbox?” Clinton raided (as did the GOP-led House) billions from trust funds and government retirement programs.
Correct. So if there was a “surplus”, the debt (the accumulation of all deficits) would have decreased year over year.
It didn’t. So there wasn’t.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm
It doesn’t take smarts to dodge the draft. It takes a rich daddy. Bigger military budget than the height of Iraq War. Lowest troop casualties in 15 years. And all we’ve got is sob stories from the idea less Trumpsters, led by their draft dodging CinC, who chest thumps on Twitter after he actually pulls off a drone strike while throwing tantrums in strategy meetings.
I wouldn’t know as I don’t practice long distance amateur psychiatry as a rule.
Not true. Half of of the 4,500+ deaths in combat operational areas since 9/11 are directly attributable to IEDs.
Yep. 16,000 troops have died since 2006. Only 28% of that have been caused by enemy action. 14% we self inflicted through substance abuse. 16% were vehicular accidents. Between 2006-18 there were over 450 deaths labeled as homicides. And the overwhelming majority of all military deaths happen on US soil. But that doesn’t mean that some of those deaths were not directly related to combat. It’s just the clinical and cold application of statistics.
The day after the 2016 election Jonah Goldberg declared that the Never Trump movement was dead, and was using phrases such as “giving him a fresh start” and “giving him the benefit of the doubt”.
Well, that certainly didn’t happen.
They seem more annoyed that ever, and I guess it’s just going to get worse and worse.
This one aged well:
https://twitter.com/sallykohn/status/796173217530527744?lang=en
Even Paul Ryan seemed happy that Trump had won that day, but when it came to immigration issues Speaker Ryan was always much more aligned with his far-left radical friend Luis Gutiérrez than with the Republican Party voters.
Rather than deal with non-falsifiable theorems, the better question might be What has Trump accomplished that neither of the Bushes could accomplish?
GHW Bush didn’t fold on Clarence Thomas. I just see things differently than you – I think the Kavanaugh hearings were a godsend to the Republican Party and every one of the men above would have seen it and stood by him. The only President that waffled on a judicial appointment in my lifetime was Reagan on Robert Bork. Next time Trump waffles in front of an Erdogan you’ll say that proves he’s another gipper.
I just wish we could get rid of the questioning of each other’s motives. Jonah and I see Trump’s impact very differently that the majority of the Ricochetti. He’s not doing it for Soros’ money or diabolical purposes, he believes in what he says.
Like I said above, the Pundit Bubble is overdue for bursting. In fact we may be witnessing the beginnings of it.
Harriet Miers? And Bork wasn’t withdrawn. He was defeated 58-42.
Nah. The Bulwark and the Dispatch are all about trying to prevent his re-election. That’s why the left-wingers fund them. After President Trump’s reelection, their sugar daddies will probably yank funding, because what would be the point anymore? Look for The Bulwark to fold after November this year, and The Dispatch soon afterward.
Rich daddy? Going all populist on us all of a sudden? Your characterizations are hilarious. Calm down. It’s not like you have relatives in wheelchairs from IEDs or really care about much but, um, moralism-by-proxy and the national debt(?) Good luck with that one!
That is the most remarkable juxtaposition of sentiments in back-to-back sentences I’ve ever seen.
Good, useful term. Might have to adopt that one.