Progressive Politics

1. Most political consultants are not media experts, and overwhelmingly, they do not understand how to build trust with audiences. And unfortunately, the bulk of the well funded Dem media projects are run, not by experienced media entrepreneurs or journalists or influencers who've proven they know what they're doing, but by political consultants and ex political consultants.

2. Because these things are run by political people and not, say people with newsroom experience, they wildly underestimate the importance of transparency in building trust, and wildly overestimate the downside of disclosure.

3. As a function of this, they think media and advertising are the same thing, and that traffic and audience are the same thing. They think of spending and investing in media as a tactical strategy that can be tied to electoral cycles. When my cofounders and I first started talking to people about The Barbed Wire, one of the first questions we got was about what the newsroom would yield in terms of cost per vote. This is entirely the wrong way to think about it--useful for political advertising, useless for thinking about long term voter engagement, driving the overall narrative, and counter-programming right wing media with the actual truth. Organic audiences take time to build, are largely resistant to paid acquisition, and only come back if the content is actually good and engaging.

4. The content is all too often bad commodity content. It's boring aggregation with no voice and no wit and no new angle. It includes strident Dem messaging that has been tested and workshopped to death and doesn't reflect the real world discussions people are having. Meanwhile, the right produces stuff that's provocative, is not afraid of contradictory messaging, is experimental, and trusts the people actually writing and scripting and shooting the content to figure out what works best. Dems want to dictate it from top down, sometimes directly to satisfy donor preferences.

6) We need to try things knowing that most of them will fail, and be much more risk tolerant with content. This is how we innovate. 

I think right and left media are heavily asymmetrical so I try resist direct comparisons (e.g, one side is willing to weaponize conspiracy theories, the other is not.) But one thing that the right does that the left does not is spread a lot of money around, try everything, and not flagellate themselves endlessly when something fails. Every time I talk to people about funding liberal media projects, they bring up Air America. Air America!! Air America had a six year run, and it died FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. It has zero relevancy to our media environment here in the year of our lord twenty twenty five. 

First of all, there should have been twenty Air Americas and not one, and second of all, it is beyond pathetic that the attitude is, we tried it once and it failed so no point in ever trying it again. There are smaller investments that Dems have made but they still fit the bill above: small, run by political operatives, not too risky. The most risque thing Dems have funded so far is Pod Save America, and I like those guys, but it's a podcast run by political operatives that preaches to the choir. And look, preaching to the choir is important. It motivates people to go a step beyond voting. It keeps engaged people engaged and hopeful. But we need broader efforts and those require more money and more risk. For all of the talk about building a new media effort that might appeal to young men, I do not think the people putting money into Dem efforts are prepared to take the kind of risk you'd need to take to make content that actually appeals to that demographic.