It’s the season of giving and everybody has their hand out. No shame. I’m referring mostly to websites that send “please contribute” emails—although walking down N. Charles St. in Baltimore, the army of hobos, alleged PTSD vets, teenagers wearing expensive sneakers and grouchy old ladies, increases right around Thanksgiving—which are usually deleted. (Charity is idiosyncratic, and in the days leading up to Christmas, I stuff my pockets with $10 bills to put in the palms of legitimate panhandlers.)
This was a first: a cry for help from RealClearPolitics, the excellent aggregator and polling website founded in 2000 by Tom Bevans and John McIntyre. David DesRosiers, president of RealClear Media Fund, “reached out” to me (and countless others on RCP’s mailing list) with a breezy but saccharine pitch—he’ll be a grandfather soon!—that was off-putting. An excerpt: “It pays to be partisan in today’s media landscape. But we’re still pushing against the ideological, close-minded censorious grain… If you’re reading this and haven’t given before, please consider joining us as a reader-supporter… We hope you consider independent and unbiased news coverage as vital as we do. Our need for support is real and enduring, as is our thanks.”
No thanks, bud. I scan RCP almost every day, as I have since the early-2000s, and wouldn’t be happy if the organization folded. But the leaders there have access to deep-pocketed men and women and if I were so inclined, my check for $100 would mean nothing. This isn’t a website starting from scratch.
At The New Republic, playing Oliver Twist isn’t seasonal, but year-round, every year. It’s a lousy magazine, and I let my subscription lapse around the same time that terrific movie, Shattered Glass (starring the under-appreciated Peter Sarsgaard, as TNR editor Charles Lane when the well-known, and crippling Stephen Glass story fabrications caused a media sensation) came out in 2003. The come-on: “Become a TNR member for 50% off. Get the most out of TNR’s breaking news and in-depth analysis with our membership subscriptions, featuring exclusive benefits that help you dive deeper in today’s top stories.”
Christ, you know it ain’t easy. The current TNR is a disgraceful publication/website, and I never “dive deeper” into their “in-depth analysis.” I’ve yet to receive a gimme-gimme plea from The Atlantic, and probably won’t since it’s well-funded, but if I want to prick myself with a foot-long needle to find out why the United States is no longer a democracy (never mind that off-year elections, favorable for Democrats, were conducted a month ago), I’ll go there if only because some of the writers, unlike TNR, can string two coherent sentences together.
The nerviest pitch I’ve received was from—unsurprisingly—the con woman (all legal) known as Bari Weiss, a media phenomenon who sold her bland website The Free Press to Paramount for an incomprehensible $150 million (if you believe news reports) in October and was named editor-in-chief of CBS News. Bari’s a trip: her journalistic talent is just passable (no wonder The New York Times hired her in 2017) and modern cliches soil her prose, but her confidence is off the charts, which anyone in media (even in secret) can admire.
The email waiting for me last week, “A Note from Bari—and Our Best Deal of the Year,” was as zany as anything I’ve read recently. Who knows how she divides her time, but this bit is rich: “As we near a community of two million—a figure I would have found unimaginable when I first started this little pirate ship five years ago—it’s clear we’re doing something right. We’re building a real community committed to seeing the world as it actually is. A community of free thinkers who know that free people deserve a free press.” Let humility and grace weigh down “influencers” in other “communities,” working-34-hours-a-day Bari won’t back down.
You’d think that The Free Press, owned by a conglomerate, wouldn’t find it necessary to play the Salvation Army’s Santa Claus, but as Bari would say, “here we are.” Why the ads on Twitter? Why the obnoxious subscription drive? Her “note” was full of gratitude: for her “brilliant” colleagues, the “wild, wonderful community we’ve built,” her “amazing new podcasts,” the “slate of brilliant new columnists,” and the site’s “amazing cultural coverage.” Gratitude for her new wealth was downplayed: “[We] joined forces with Paramount to help bring our work to as many people as possible.” Bari’s a gauche, egocentric entrepreneur whose “amazing” website is squarely in the media mainstream, not “groundbreaking,” but also not ridiculously off-putting. Just one example of a “brilliant” Free Press contributor follows.
Larry Gondelman, 73, told the Free Press “community” that he’s a rock ‘n’ roller for life. He starts: “If you’re a Boomer like me, you can’t help but view your teenage years as the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll.” Fuck it, I can’t even look at this tripe for a moment longer. Proceed, if you must, with caution.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023