The American public’s relationship with the mainstream media (MSM) has been in decline for decades. Unfortunately, rather than engaging in healthy self-analysis, MSM leaders seem intent on ramping up their smears of independent media that succeed in practicing real journalism outside the MSM echo chamber.
So, where are people consuming news if not via the MSM? One source is Substack, which has attracted writers from the right and left sides of the political spectrum, and created an uncensored home for their work. Writers are paid through direct reader subscriptions, and a writer’s revenues are entirely dependent on his or her ability to write what people care to read. On sites like Substack, readers subscribe individually to each writer and thus support the writers financially by subscription.
The MSM has taken notice of Substack’s success — and predictably attacked it. In response, Glenn Greenwald, a left-leaning journalist known for his work on the Julian Assange story for the London Guardian, wrote a seminal article, “Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: To Bar Critiques of Journalists.” The article characterized the attacks as “an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.” Greenwald went on to say, “That is why journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.”
Matt Taibbi, a left-leaning journalist formerly with Rolling Stone magazine, also writes articles on Substack. Taibbi recently published an article titled, “Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common Interests Now.” On June 2, 2021, a Daily Beast headline asked, “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media?” In response, Taibbi called out the Daily Beast for their outrage that Glenn Greenwald frequently appears on Fox News and “helps provide content for — gasp! — right wing media” and “orchestrate[s] his very own
news cycles”when they routinely do the same with their “headlines from Bountygate to Bernie’s Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin’s ‘Trump Admits I Don’t Care About America.’” The article goes on to say that the “prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls” will demean and cancel “any progressive critic of the political mainstream” as “a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an ‘insurrectionist’!”
In Taibbi’s words, “The traditional liberal approach to the search for the truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of ‘experts.’ It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.”
Podcasts are another fast-growing arm of independent news. By some estimates, there are presently more than 2 million podcasts and 48 million episodes (see Podcast Insights, “2021 Podcast Stats & Facts”). Sixteen million people in the U.S. are “avid podcast fans,” as reported by Nielsen Q1 2018.
Who is this audience listening to and/or watching? Joe Rogan leads with “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Spotify shelled out $100 million to bring Joe’s podcast exclusively to its platform. According to Media Monitors, Joe’s show was the most popular on Spotify in 2020 and is the number one podcast of all.
Bari Weiss started in print journalism and now is adding a podcast to her offerings. In July 2020, Weiss, who had served as opinion editor for the New York Times, penned a scathing letter of resignation in which she alleged she had been subjected to “constant bullying” from colleagues who considered many of her ideas to be “wrongthink.” Weiss said she was hired in 2017 by the Times to bring in “voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages,” including conservatives and centrists. Weiss said in her resignation letter addressed to publisher A. G. Sulzberger, “Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job it is to inform everyone else.”
Weiss launched her digital newsletter on Substack in January 2021 and has not looked back. She currently has 70,000 subscribers, 12,000 of which are paid. In addition, Weiss announced on June 6 that she is launching a podcast named “Honestly with Bari Weiss.” “The most interesting conversations in American life now happen in private,” reads her show’s description. “This show is bringing them out of the closet.”
In the face of the MSM’s irrational attacks on independent journalists, some of the most credible voices are moving to their own platforms, and finding success. Not only that, but liberals and conservatives are finding common ground in defending and championing free speech — and the independent media sources and voices who bring it to them.
