The Free Press is more conservative than you think. I subscribed back when it was called Common Sense, hoping for evenhanded journalism that would fairly represent some conservative principles without falling into the MAGAsphere black hole. What I got was a constant stream of "look at these crazy/evil libs and how they're trying to destroy the country!!!" Bad stuff.
Yeah, agreed. I did enjoy it when they dug into Biden's cognitive state when he did almost no media appearances. And their podcast series on JK Rowling was enlightening. But the way in which they vigorously attack fairly level-headed people on the left is pretty cringe.
They could also be a little more critical of Israel, for which they were fierce advocates when Israel was still behaving at the border of what was a reasonable response to October 7, but on which they have been very quiet since Israel has gone completely off the deep end into what most people would reasonably call genocide.
Absolutely. As someone who has been, at times, critical of some of the excesses of the left, I was interested initially in their mission. It very quickly it just turned out to be nonsense, or at least just a thinly veiled way to settle grudges with some of the people in the traditional media they felt had wronged them.
I suspect that many writers there didn't start out that way, but they go where their audience goes. What gets positive feedback is "look at dumb libruls". Anytime they punch right, they get assailed by their readership. I used to like some of the posts at "Liberal Patriot" that were thoughtful introspections on how liberalism had lost its way. But I found the comments there were very much thirsty for talking about how bad Democrats were, and grew irate any time the writers said anything bad about the right (which, the word liberal is in the title of the blog!)
My question, which applies to a lot of what is happening in the Trump era, is what happens on day one after Trump? While I am sympathetic to the idea that a tit for tat battle just further erodes democratic norms and have concerns about further infringement on the first amendment, I don't think these sort of flagrant bribes can pass with impunity. This sort of behavior has to result in repercussions, lest we think that whatever inhereter of the MAGA movement won't try the exact same thing in a less ham handed approach. The consolidation of media amongst MAGA friendly billionaires seems very similar to the consolidation of Russian media and industry
President Ocasio-Cortez's new FCC head says "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" when talking about CBS' FCC license over comments made by CBS news editor Bari Weiss.
"Sidenote - why do we always describe sudden rises as meteoric? Isn’t the defining feature of a meteor that it falls, never to rise again?"
From your lips to God's ears.
Honestly, I only really became aware of Weiss when she was going through that shit with the rest of the NYT newsroom, and I had some sympathy for her situation there....but then every single decision she's made since then has clocked in and worked Sundays to push me hard away from her, the FP as an entity, and anyone associated with it.
The double standards and finger-on-the-scaleness that entire clown car showed during the '24 election was embarrassing. It was a thousand different iterations of "Hilary the Hawk, Donald the Dove" but for the "muh free speech" crowd. Anyone with two eyes, a brain, and a memory longer than five years could tell you that there might not ever have existed an American President *less* interested in free speech than this jamoke. He believes in free speech the exact same way he believes in Christianity, and to see them parse every single word of Harris's speeches while hand-waving Trump's flaws was the height of journalistic malpractice.
The right has portrayed the "mainstream media" as left-wing for decades. This is helped by the fact that most journalists are left-leaning (and have gotten increasingly so), though media company owners are rarely lefty and are often right leaning. As this article shows, the owners are moving further toward the right, specifically to placate Trump.
Okay I’ll bite. I’m a left-centrist Free Press subscriber who voted Clinton - Biden - Harris.
I find attacks against centrist / Free Press subscribers / heterodox people quite alienating. So much so that I’m not sure if I’ll keep voting for democrats. When I say this I get attacked even more from the left.
At a time when the Democratic Party needs to build a bigger tent why not extend an olive branch to people who are 75% with you but not 100%?
Maybe not the piece so much. But the top comments (the fp is a “MAGAsphere black hole”) signal to me that I thought I was in coalition with the new liberal folks but maybe I’m not?
Also like most Americans I have very low trust in legacy media so I view shake ups as largely positive and not a “troubling pattern”. I think democrats need to stop defending unpopular institutions like CBS, the NYT.
Agreed (also Clinton-Biden-Harris voter). So many events in 2020 and 2021 fundamentally destroyed my trust in legacy media. Covid origins, stop Asian hate, the disinformation craze, trans extremism (I am a gay man) etc. and the level of control felt truly chilling.
That’s why I found the free press to be a badly needed force to break the bubble and provide actual news that wasn’t obvious propaganda (also including Fox News and co. in this).
Since then I’ve definitely noticed a rightward drift in the publication and especially the reader base (which I think is far to the right of the free press staff). And I just cannot fully trust the Israel coverage. My concern is also that this will just turn cbs into another Fox News. However I sincerely hope that there can be a media outlet that is not fully in either partisan camp. Or at least enough so that some people in the middle will see their views represented. But honestly I don’t know what will happen.
77% of Americans feel the system needs major change. A major problem is that affordable housing, healthcare and education are out of reach.
Democrats need to fight anyone (left or right) who is standing between voters and these things.
To deliver housing, healthcare, education, I want to see democrats fighting corporate power, wealthy universities who keep jacking up prices, environmental groups who block housing, healthcare lobbyist, the American medical association, etc.
I don’t care to see democrats defend CBS or whatever. If you’re defending the status quo you’re out of touch with most Americans.
I understand this point of view and it's very commonly held. But I also think it's mistaken about how the world works in many cases. The instinct to toss out all the insiders, overthrow all the systems, fight all the power, etc, often misses the details of how to actually change things for the better.
One example - You mention 'wealthy universities' who keep jacking up prices, but do you actually understand why that happens? Do you know the role federal loan guarantees play. Do you know where the money is actually going (mostly sparkling new facilities and administrative bloat)? Do you know *why* new facilities and additional administrators are so common, what incentives are driving them?
And most crucially, did you ever stop to question your own assumptions? Did you know that the cost of college has actually decreased over the last ten years?
"The College Board found in-state tuition for a public university is down to $11,610 a year, compared to $12,140 a decade ago. After grant aid is applied, the average student would pay $2,480, a decrease from the 2014-2015 school year, when that amount totaled $4,140."
Did you know that most colleges aren't wealthy at all, and in fact the most common condition isn't wealth but financial insecurity leading to the danger of closing, mostly due to the coming demographic cliff?
If you're focused on anger at the status quo, you miss all the nuance. By all means, be angry where appropriate. But anger alone isn't enough. That leads to a focus on destruction like we saw with DOGE, which leads to millions dead.
Thank you for your thoughtful response Jeremiah. As a reader and listener of the new liberal pod, it really means something that you've taken the time to respond.
I think we would both agree that public support for universities (and other institutions) in America is toxically low. We'd probably also both agree that in some ways this is fair and in other ways unfair. Universities have made genuine mistakes, but also it's very hard to run a university!
The fork in the road for Democrats is do they
1. Push back against the anger and try to persuade Americans that actually they should understand the nuance and feel better about higher education (or insert other institution).
2. Channel the anger into some story of transformation (abundance or something). Signal to the voter that if the choice is between the institutions and voter, Democrats are with the voter.
In many ways it reminds me of the Biden / Harris campaign's difficulty with inflation. They kept trying to tell voters that inflation is *not so bad actually!* *Look at the economic data!* Telling voters that their concerns are "mistaken" seems like a bad strategy.
Public support in institutions is so low that they will have to be DOGE'd in some sense. I think Democrats should be the ones to do it, so institutions they can be remade in a moral, inclusive way. But if Democrats won't do it, then Republicans will.
It also confusing why left-leaning people attack new ideas like the University of Austin. Many of the left were quick to label it a "right-wing / MAGA" project. Telling Independent-leaning folks that they are actually Republicans seems like a huge self-own.
Democrats should tell independent-leaning Free Press subscribers / University of Austin supporters / Joe Rogan listeners: "We're on your side! You're right in important ways! We agree universities need to be serving families better. Sounds totally reasonable to expand the nursing programs so more young people can get well paying healthcare jobs. Let make sure our universities help young people get good, well-paid jobs!"
But Democrats don't say that. They say "You guys are wrong. We're against you. We're going to spend $xx billion on new nursing programs to advance our equity goals." Then they lose elections.
I think the center left needs to do away with the collective delusion that Bari Weiss has anything profound or insightful to say.
Her job was to “have opinions” for the national audience of the WSJ and the Times. But she still felt suffocated. Whatever reach she gets, it’s never gonna be enough. She is entitled to the world hearing her opinions.
I always like to remind people that when Bari’s sister got rejected from the Ivies for having a pretty mediocre application (by Ivy standards), their parents got her national media attention for it.
What we are dealing with here, is a spoiled rich kid. She and David Ellison will get along wonderfully.
This strategy is how Orban captured the media landscape in Hungary when he came to power in 2010. Hungary's media landscape was already fragile: the Hungarian language media market is small, the companies weren't making a lot of ad revenue, and many outlets were owned by indebted businessmen. So oligarchs aligned with the Fidesz Party (notably Lorinc Meszaros - a childhood friend of Orban) began buying TV channels, radio stations, and newspapers. Sometimes these oligarchs were given state-linked bank loans to do so. Once these media outlets were captured, critical editors were quietly replaced or sidelined, not fired in a spectacle.
Granted, Orban had a lot of help that Trump currently doesn't have. Fidesz won a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority to rewrite the media laws in Hungary within months. They created a media council packed entirely with Fidesz loyalists and give it sweeping powers over broadcast licensing, content fines, and journalist accreditation. Fortunately, we don't have that same bureaucratic choke point here in part because Trump thankfully didn't win a supermajority. But I suspect that the reason why CPAC hosts conferences in Budapest and has such tight relationships with Fidesz is because CPAC wanted to learn from the Hungarians. By the late 2010s, must Hungarian media was owned by a pro-government foundation that "donated" outlets from different oligarchs into a centralized trust called the KESMA conglomerate.
Attention scarcity and epistemic fragmentation kill democracies with a thousand cuts.
What gets me about the Ellison media consolidation is how Weiss has positioned herself as this defender of free speech, yet here she is taking $150M from a guy who is literally in Trumps inner circle. The cognitive dissonance is wild when you consider she built her brand on calling out institutional capture, but now shes become the poster child for exactly what she used to critcize. The pattern with these settlements is especially troubling because it shows how quickly these companies fold once Trump has actual power to threaten their broadcast licenses.
The inclusion of the word 'rise' is an indication that meteoric is about the sudden nature of the action. The rise is separate. One could suffer a meteoric descent, but that pairing is less common, because falling is more about the impact at the bottom than the spectacle of the trip.
This insightful piece shows how moments like this reach beyond one person. It captures how power works beneath the surface — Rome had roads, Britain had shipping lanes, and perhaps now it’s newsfeeds
"Even supposedly non-political billionaires like Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have to find ways to kiss the ring, lest their companies come under attack. They, along with plenty of others, have scrambled to donate to Trump’s inauguration, to make right-leaning public statements, to shift their moderation policies, to make White House appearances. They know that if they don’t play nice, their companies could be in trouble."
For Zuckerberg at least he seems to feel that his company was previously under attack and that shifted his alignment.
My mental model of Zuckerberg is that he says whatever the current powers that be want to hear. In 2020 he was a guy who vowed to 'do better', who embraced DEI thought and wanted to toughen up content moderation. He did those things because that was the zeitgeist.
Now the zeitgeist is 'be macho and complain about woke leftists' and so that's what he does. Neither stance was sincere, he just wants to be allowed to build his AI slop palace in peace.
I think that is all fair but I think this quote from the piece you linked is probably not unrelated to his rightward shift:
“Really, when you think about it, the U.S. government should be defending its companies,” Zuckerberg said. “Not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies.”
If we see another shift maybe that will be more revealing.
This highlights a problem that has been increasingly common throughout our economy: consolidation. Nearly every industry is engaged in mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation which serves to funnel financial power down to a select few entities who then can effectively wield it with great influence. Nexstar and Sinclair are prime examples.
Thanks for pointing out this issue in the media space. It’s clearly concerning, especially when paired with an authoritarian-esque executive who only has to apply pressure at few points to achieve his/her goals.
The Free Press is more conservative than you think. I subscribed back when it was called Common Sense, hoping for evenhanded journalism that would fairly represent some conservative principles without falling into the MAGAsphere black hole. What I got was a constant stream of "look at these crazy/evil libs and how they're trying to destroy the country!!!" Bad stuff.
Yeah, agreed. I did enjoy it when they dug into Biden's cognitive state when he did almost no media appearances. And their podcast series on JK Rowling was enlightening. But the way in which they vigorously attack fairly level-headed people on the left is pretty cringe.
They could also be a little more critical of Israel, for which they were fierce advocates when Israel was still behaving at the border of what was a reasonable response to October 7, but on which they have been very quiet since Israel has gone completely off the deep end into what most people would reasonably call genocide.
Absolutely. As someone who has been, at times, critical of some of the excesses of the left, I was interested initially in their mission. It very quickly it just turned out to be nonsense, or at least just a thinly veiled way to settle grudges with some of the people in the traditional media they felt had wronged them.
I suspect that many writers there didn't start out that way, but they go where their audience goes. What gets positive feedback is "look at dumb libruls". Anytime they punch right, they get assailed by their readership. I used to like some of the posts at "Liberal Patriot" that were thoughtful introspections on how liberalism had lost its way. But I found the comments there were very much thirsty for talking about how bad Democrats were, and grew irate any time the writers said anything bad about the right (which, the word liberal is in the title of the blog!)
Audience capture is a real thing for sure.
My question, which applies to a lot of what is happening in the Trump era, is what happens on day one after Trump? While I am sympathetic to the idea that a tit for tat battle just further erodes democratic norms and have concerns about further infringement on the first amendment, I don't think these sort of flagrant bribes can pass with impunity. This sort of behavior has to result in repercussions, lest we think that whatever inhereter of the MAGA movement won't try the exact same thing in a less ham handed approach. The consolidation of media amongst MAGA friendly billionaires seems very similar to the consolidation of Russian media and industry
President Ocasio-Cortez's new FCC head says "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" when talking about CBS' FCC license over comments made by CBS news editor Bari Weiss.
"Sidenote - why do we always describe sudden rises as meteoric? Isn’t the defining feature of a meteor that it falls, never to rise again?"
From your lips to God's ears.
Honestly, I only really became aware of Weiss when she was going through that shit with the rest of the NYT newsroom, and I had some sympathy for her situation there....but then every single decision she's made since then has clocked in and worked Sundays to push me hard away from her, the FP as an entity, and anyone associated with it.
The double standards and finger-on-the-scaleness that entire clown car showed during the '24 election was embarrassing. It was a thousand different iterations of "Hilary the Hawk, Donald the Dove" but for the "muh free speech" crowd. Anyone with two eyes, a brain, and a memory longer than five years could tell you that there might not ever have existed an American President *less* interested in free speech than this jamoke. He believes in free speech the exact same way he believes in Christianity, and to see them parse every single word of Harris's speeches while hand-waving Trump's flaws was the height of journalistic malpractice.
The right has portrayed the "mainstream media" as left-wing for decades. This is helped by the fact that most journalists are left-leaning (and have gotten increasingly so), though media company owners are rarely lefty and are often right leaning. As this article shows, the owners are moving further toward the right, specifically to placate Trump.
Okay I’ll bite. I’m a left-centrist Free Press subscriber who voted Clinton - Biden - Harris.
I find attacks against centrist / Free Press subscribers / heterodox people quite alienating. So much so that I’m not sure if I’ll keep voting for democrats. When I say this I get attacked even more from the left.
At a time when the Democratic Party needs to build a bigger tent why not extend an olive branch to people who are 75% with you but not 100%?
Do you think this piece was attacking Free Press subscribers?
Maybe not the piece so much. But the top comments (the fp is a “MAGAsphere black hole”) signal to me that I thought I was in coalition with the new liberal folks but maybe I’m not?
Also like most Americans I have very low trust in legacy media so I view shake ups as largely positive and not a “troubling pattern”. I think democrats need to stop defending unpopular institutions like CBS, the NYT.
Agreed (also Clinton-Biden-Harris voter). So many events in 2020 and 2021 fundamentally destroyed my trust in legacy media. Covid origins, stop Asian hate, the disinformation craze, trans extremism (I am a gay man) etc. and the level of control felt truly chilling.
That’s why I found the free press to be a badly needed force to break the bubble and provide actual news that wasn’t obvious propaganda (also including Fox News and co. in this).
Since then I’ve definitely noticed a rightward drift in the publication and especially the reader base (which I think is far to the right of the free press staff). And I just cannot fully trust the Israel coverage. My concern is also that this will just turn cbs into another Fox News. However I sincerely hope that there can be a media outlet that is not fully in either partisan camp. Or at least enough so that some people in the middle will see their views represented. But honestly I don’t know what will happen.
Which *popular* institutions do you think need defending?
Democrats need to stop “defending institutions”.
77% of Americans feel the system needs major change. A major problem is that affordable housing, healthcare and education are out of reach.
Democrats need to fight anyone (left or right) who is standing between voters and these things.
To deliver housing, healthcare, education, I want to see democrats fighting corporate power, wealthy universities who keep jacking up prices, environmental groups who block housing, healthcare lobbyist, the American medical association, etc.
I don’t care to see democrats defend CBS or whatever. If you’re defending the status quo you’re out of touch with most Americans.
I understand this point of view and it's very commonly held. But I also think it's mistaken about how the world works in many cases. The instinct to toss out all the insiders, overthrow all the systems, fight all the power, etc, often misses the details of how to actually change things for the better.
One example - You mention 'wealthy universities' who keep jacking up prices, but do you actually understand why that happens? Do you know the role federal loan guarantees play. Do you know where the money is actually going (mostly sparkling new facilities and administrative bloat)? Do you know *why* new facilities and additional administrators are so common, what incentives are driving them?
And most crucially, did you ever stop to question your own assumptions? Did you know that the cost of college has actually decreased over the last ten years?
"The College Board found in-state tuition for a public university is down to $11,610 a year, compared to $12,140 a decade ago. After grant aid is applied, the average student would pay $2,480, a decrease from the 2014-2015 school year, when that amount totaled $4,140."
Did you know that most colleges aren't wealthy at all, and in fact the most common condition isn't wealth but financial insecurity leading to the danger of closing, mostly due to the coming demographic cliff?
If you're focused on anger at the status quo, you miss all the nuance. By all means, be angry where appropriate. But anger alone isn't enough. That leads to a focus on destruction like we saw with DOGE, which leads to millions dead.
Thank you for your thoughtful response Jeremiah. As a reader and listener of the new liberal pod, it really means something that you've taken the time to respond.
I think we would both agree that public support for universities (and other institutions) in America is toxically low. We'd probably also both agree that in some ways this is fair and in other ways unfair. Universities have made genuine mistakes, but also it's very hard to run a university!
The fork in the road for Democrats is do they
1. Push back against the anger and try to persuade Americans that actually they should understand the nuance and feel better about higher education (or insert other institution).
2. Channel the anger into some story of transformation (abundance or something). Signal to the voter that if the choice is between the institutions and voter, Democrats are with the voter.
In many ways it reminds me of the Biden / Harris campaign's difficulty with inflation. They kept trying to tell voters that inflation is *not so bad actually!* *Look at the economic data!* Telling voters that their concerns are "mistaken" seems like a bad strategy.
Public support in institutions is so low that they will have to be DOGE'd in some sense. I think Democrats should be the ones to do it, so institutions they can be remade in a moral, inclusive way. But if Democrats won't do it, then Republicans will.
It also confusing why left-leaning people attack new ideas like the University of Austin. Many of the left were quick to label it a "right-wing / MAGA" project. Telling Independent-leaning folks that they are actually Republicans seems like a huge self-own.
Democrats should tell independent-leaning Free Press subscribers / University of Austin supporters / Joe Rogan listeners: "We're on your side! You're right in important ways! We agree universities need to be serving families better. Sounds totally reasonable to expand the nursing programs so more young people can get well paying healthcare jobs. Let make sure our universities help young people get good, well-paid jobs!"
But Democrats don't say that. They say "You guys are wrong. We're against you. We're going to spend $xx billion on new nursing programs to advance our equity goals." Then they lose elections.
I think the center left needs to do away with the collective delusion that Bari Weiss has anything profound or insightful to say.
Her job was to “have opinions” for the national audience of the WSJ and the Times. But she still felt suffocated. Whatever reach she gets, it’s never gonna be enough. She is entitled to the world hearing her opinions.
I always like to remind people that when Bari’s sister got rejected from the Ivies for having a pretty mediocre application (by Ivy standards), their parents got her national media attention for it.
What we are dealing with here, is a spoiled rich kid. She and David Ellison will get along wonderfully.
This strategy is how Orban captured the media landscape in Hungary when he came to power in 2010. Hungary's media landscape was already fragile: the Hungarian language media market is small, the companies weren't making a lot of ad revenue, and many outlets were owned by indebted businessmen. So oligarchs aligned with the Fidesz Party (notably Lorinc Meszaros - a childhood friend of Orban) began buying TV channels, radio stations, and newspapers. Sometimes these oligarchs were given state-linked bank loans to do so. Once these media outlets were captured, critical editors were quietly replaced or sidelined, not fired in a spectacle.
Granted, Orban had a lot of help that Trump currently doesn't have. Fidesz won a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority to rewrite the media laws in Hungary within months. They created a media council packed entirely with Fidesz loyalists and give it sweeping powers over broadcast licensing, content fines, and journalist accreditation. Fortunately, we don't have that same bureaucratic choke point here in part because Trump thankfully didn't win a supermajority. But I suspect that the reason why CPAC hosts conferences in Budapest and has such tight relationships with Fidesz is because CPAC wanted to learn from the Hungarians. By the late 2010s, must Hungarian media was owned by a pro-government foundation that "donated" outlets from different oligarchs into a centralized trust called the KESMA conglomerate.
Attention scarcity and epistemic fragmentation kill democracies with a thousand cuts.
Thank you for focusing on Ellison, which is a far bigger worries than Weiss.
There are no doubt very rich liberals who are funding lefty enviro groups. Why don't they get into media?
What gets me about the Ellison media consolidation is how Weiss has positioned herself as this defender of free speech, yet here she is taking $150M from a guy who is literally in Trumps inner circle. The cognitive dissonance is wild when you consider she built her brand on calling out institutional capture, but now shes become the poster child for exactly what she used to critcize. The pattern with these settlements is especially troubling because it shows how quickly these companies fold once Trump has actual power to threaten their broadcast licenses.
non sequitur: thank you for being one of the only people i read who hyperlinks your footnotes 😭
The inclusion of the word 'rise' is an indication that meteoric is about the sudden nature of the action. The rise is separate. One could suffer a meteoric descent, but that pairing is less common, because falling is more about the impact at the bottom than the spectacle of the trip.
This insightful piece shows how moments like this reach beyond one person. It captures how power works beneath the surface — Rome had roads, Britain had shipping lanes, and perhaps now it’s newsfeeds
What do you expect will happen to Substack (the company) in this light?
"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy." More Orwellian every single day...
"Even supposedly non-political billionaires like Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have to find ways to kiss the ring, lest their companies come under attack. They, along with plenty of others, have scrambled to donate to Trump’s inauguration, to make right-leaning public statements, to shift their moderation policies, to make White House appearances. They know that if they don’t play nice, their companies could be in trouble."
For Zuckerberg at least he seems to feel that his company was previously under attack and that shifted his alignment.
My mental model of Zuckerberg is that he says whatever the current powers that be want to hear. In 2020 he was a guy who vowed to 'do better', who embraced DEI thought and wanted to toughen up content moderation. He did those things because that was the zeitgeist.
Now the zeitgeist is 'be macho and complain about woke leftists' and so that's what he does. Neither stance was sincere, he just wants to be allowed to build his AI slop palace in peace.
I think that is all fair but I think this quote from the piece you linked is probably not unrelated to his rightward shift:
“Really, when you think about it, the U.S. government should be defending its companies,” Zuckerberg said. “Not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies.”
If we see another shift maybe that will be more revealing.
This highlights a problem that has been increasingly common throughout our economy: consolidation. Nearly every industry is engaged in mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation which serves to funnel financial power down to a select few entities who then can effectively wield it with great influence. Nexstar and Sinclair are prime examples.
Thanks for pointing out this issue in the media space. It’s clearly concerning, especially when paired with an authoritarian-esque executive who only has to apply pressure at few points to achieve his/her goals.