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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
Won’t they feel compelled to keep undercutting Trump’s successes and to make sure Pence or some other Republican doesn’t win in 2024?
It still seems more likely to me that Bulwark and Dispatch fold up if Trump is NOT re-elected. Because they will have “won.” And much of their audience will disappear.
Which also suggests that Jonah is basically betting on Trump to win, otherwise his near-future employment plans crap out.
I wasn’t questioning your motives, I was just saying loyalty to the man or to your principles gives you a different perspective. I’ve written a half-dozen comments conceding that TDS sometimes colors my judgment. I think your fervent Trump support affects you the same way. That’s not questioning your motives or saying someone is paying you off to shade your opinions.
Harriet Miers was opposed by the right, but I guess I’ll concede that one. Reagan left Bork out to dry and did not expend any political capital to get him across the line.
I have a whole post on that in my drafts. Stay tuned.
Don’t say “draft” in an election year…
I suppose that’s a possibility, too. It depends on how deep their sugar daddies’ pockets are. And whether their hatred of Trump overwhelms their innate compulsion to fund DNC candidates.
Nobody ever claimed he wasn’t cynical.
Not to go all Mencken on you…never underestimate the gullibility of silly rich people.
Jonah, French, and Hayes still add value to the conversation, IMO, by pushing back on Trumpism in thoughtful ways while maintaining clear-eyed awareness of the “as compared to what?” context — that is, there remains among them an appreciation that the Democratic alternative is worse in most cases. Whether that value is worth $100/yr is debatable. Not for this guy.
Sadly, “as compared to what?” is a consideration entirely foreign to the Kristols, Sykes, and J Rubins, post Nov 2016. To be obtuse in regards to such a fundamental conservative insight renders them intellectually childlike, their credentials be damned.
Nice to hear from you Duane, and I’ll assume Kevin Stefanski is as bright as advertised unless you inform me otherwise.
The Dispatch seems to be trying more to be self-supporting on the Ricochet model than The Bulwark, though the original sight-unseen lifetime membership offer definitely asked people to take a leap into the unknown based on what they thought it would be and what Jonah was saying it was going to be, as opposed to being able to see the product.
I think the fact that the former haven’t renounced many of their past beliefs also gives them a little more flexibility than The Bulwark has — they can run all the think-pieces they want in 2021 if Trump loses about what the GOP should do, but if they make no bones about wanting Trump to lose no matter who the Democrats’ nominee is, they’re not going to get anyone to listen to them decrying the new president’s actions or finding ways to oust that guy or gal in 2024. The Dispatch isn’t in there yet (as long as they don’t go soft on Biden).
Isn’t Jonah one of those people who says that one of the best things about the US is how it gets rich people to blow their money on sometimes/often-foolish ventures?
Maybe there’s a market opportunity for a publication focused on melding Trump’s populist inclinations, free market policies and Reaganite nationalism. (Yes, I went there.)
David Harsanyi (now with NR) Tweeted a few weeks back that he knows quite a few people in Washington, people he counts as friends, who set up organizations that do nothing but beg for donations, and then maybe answer the phone if a reporter calls them for a quote.
Jonah also seems to deny the “as compared to what?”… model?.. because, as he puts it, “the election is over.”
No reason you shouldn’t. Populism and Nationalism are not dirty words. Funny how the people who complain the most about such things also claim the mantle of Reagan. It’s like they never knew him.
Gabby Hayes had whiskers. LENIN had a beard.
Theodore Roosevelt was a patriot. HITLER was a nationalist.
It’s apparently not just a prospective thing, where pundits most recently said that Obama and Trump were both “vessels” into which people poured their own beliefs/prejudices/whatever and then voted for them while believing that’s who they were; it’s also a retrospective thing where people can believe that Reagan was whoever they now imagine he was…
Not exactly a new phenomenon really. Since people have been doing that with Roosevelt, Hoover, JFK, etc for decades. And now liberals can supposedly praise Reagan who was the usual Actually Hitler at that time.
Some people probably do that with every politician, rather than take any time to figure out what they’re really like. Although in fairness, many politicians REALLY ARE such empty vessels.
As I’ve said on countless occasions, the irrational reactions to this president by his detractors is directly responsible for what some might see as irrational support from others. But none is more egregious than attacking the average Trump supporter.
So many of us were turned from lukewarm supporters to avid supporters by the attacks leveled against us, not by the attacks on the President. What’s amazing is that these “towering intellectuals” on the right can’t seem to grasp the level of their own culpability in this. Unfortunately, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. They have neutered themselves as marketable commodities on the right and have to go begging elsewhere to find allies.
It makes no sense whatsoever for a Bill Kristol and a Charlie Sykes to alienate themselves from 90% of their potential audience and then knock off another 9% by hiring someone like Molly Jong Fast. (Her pieces on CPAC earned her honors with napalm clusters in a condescension.)
Energy independence was accomplished in the oil patch. Trump had nothing to do with it.
What makes you think that Rubio, Cruz, or Jeb would not have taken advantage of that development as Trump did?
Hmmn, I could do that.
You might not be amoral enough.
Yeah. It’s been a hindrance my whole career. Kept me out of jails and law schools, though.
Reagan was pre-occupied by Iran-Contra — the hearings began a couple of months before Bork’s nomination — and in any case had only a year and a half left in his second term.
He had no political capital to expend.
So you’re saying that Trump didn’t change anything about how oil/gas drilling/exploration was done, after Obama left office?
“Fascinating.”
And podcasts. They have to have a podcast.
Everyone has a podcast. But most people shouldn’t.
This will be my last comment on this post. [Roars of approval throughout the land]
I have worked hard, but apparently not hard enough, to separate my contempt for the political fixers like Prebus and Spicer et al and the average Trump voter that held their nose on election day. I know Jonah has worked hard as well to point out he has no objection to transactional voters that made a binary choice.
I do not think the hard core of Trump support in the early primaries represents “the average Trump supporter” though. We had record numbers of real Republicans setting attendance records in those primaries trying to counteract the votes of Trump’s hard core base.
Then he needs to work harder at not looking down his nose and sniffing as if something smells bad.
I’ve heard that before and from others, but really it’s their own fault if they couldn’t get together behind ONE non-Trump candidate. Although that still might not have been enough. Being graceful losers gets really old.
Ongoing scandal. Left wing groups promote evil but at least the use the money towards a goal rather than solely for income for the promoters.
Yeah, leftists use the money they get for evil, but at least they’re not SELFISH and GREEDY! Yeesh.
No. More to the point, they do not mislead their donors about how the money is going to be used. That the forces of evil are more ethical in this regard than a lot of professional parasites on the right is a disgrace.
That’s what I meant. the left “honestly” uses their money to kill unborn babies etc. While those on the right line their pockets.