What’s next for Drop SiteThe newsletters that run Capitol Hill are written for insiders. Ours won’t be.
At Drop Site, we’re launching something new that we need your help with. More on how you can help below, but first, let me lay out the problem we plan to solve. What voters asked forLook at what even JD Vance said out loud after the election. In his own words, he interpreted the results of Tuesday’s election as an order from the voters to:
Democrats, broadly, agree with that set of priorities, particularly the new candidates who won this week. So the agenda of Congress, and the approach to covering it by the media, obviously ought to reflect this new mandate, right? If only it was that easy. What the coverage left outCNN’s first impulse, for instance, was to ask James Talarico – apparently in all sincerity – if he will stand up to Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate. And as votes were being cast on Tuesday, Punchbowl, which runs a powerful and widely read Capitol Hill newsletter, reported in a text message, exclusively to subscribers: “Top House and Senate Republican and Democratic appropriators are planning to meet early next week to discuss FY2027 funding. Gov. funding runs out on Dec. 11. This four corners meeting will kick off lame-duck spending talks.” You might notice something about that news report: It is utterly inscrutable to anybody who isn’t steeped in Capitol Hill minutiae. What funding choices will be discussed? What are the battle lines? What on earth is a “four corners meeting” and is this something the public can participate in – since, after all, they will be spending the people’s money on, allegedly, the voters’ priorities. If the goal of the news item was to mystify the process and keep the public out of it, mission accomplished. What the news item left out is crucial, however: The December 11th deadline is an opportunity for Democrats and antiwar Republicans to cut off money for the war in a way that would genuinely force it to end, just as Vice President J.D. Vance says we ought to. That’s how the Vietnam war was brought to an end by Congress, and that’s how this one can be. Yet top-ranking Democrats and Republicans are working quickly and quietly behind the scenes to pass a spending bill that makes it impossible to have that fight, leaving the war-making power in the hands of President Trump. Sounds like big news, right? That’s the news people need to know, so they can act on it before it’s too late, and before we’re back in another phase of the war voters so fiercely rejected. We need to raise $100,000 before December 11 to get this off the ground. Can you chip in today? Who Capitol Hill news is written forThe structure of today’s congressional reporting is such that it can’t truly produce the kind of journalism the public needs to be able to weigh in. The audience is lobbyists and insiders, and the advertisers are the ones most heavily affected by Congress: defense contractors, AI, Big Pharma, financial institutions and crypto, and Big Oil make up the bulk of the revenue for the media companies covering Capitol Hill. The dominant forces are Punchbowl, Politico, and Axios, each of which publish influential newsletters. But when it comes to issues of war and peace, AI, or Israel, their coverage routinely pulls punches. Capitol Hill’s information ecosystem is heavily contaminated by newsletter culture, but there isn’t a single newsletter that is aimed at a mass public audience. The thinking is that the public just doesn’t care enough. But there used to be one in the 2010s. It was called HuffPost Hill, and in its prime it had a huge readership and was highly influential on the Hill. Everyone read it because everyone read it, and it broke news that the others would miss. I co-wrote it for years, but it’s sadly gone defunct. In January, ten or eleven new Democratic senators will arrive in town, joined by many dozens of House freshmen. What they produce as lawmakers will depend significantly on the information diet they have available to them. If it’s simply the toxic corporate brew that’s served up today, we shouldn’t be surprised at what comes out the other end. Drop Site is entering the arenaOver the past two years, Drop Site has built up the institutional credibility — partly thanks to the video interviews done by our indefatigable and omnipresent colleague Julian Andreone — to compete in this space. Not only can we produce a newsletter that helps drive the conversation, but it will also act as a check against the others, and push them to beat us in the areas where we’ll focus: war, our complicity with war crimes and genocide, the role of AI in society, and, as Vance put it, “cost of living/inflation.” (Looks like he was afraid of the term affordability.) That’s the gap our new Hill coverage will fill. We plan to launch ahead of the Dec. 11 war funding deadline, and I’ll dust off my congressional loafers to help the small team we’re building. Too often investigative journalism tells us what has already happened. The public needs to know what our political leaders are planning to do before they do it. If you can make a contribution – big or small – that goes a long way. We need millions of people reading this newsletter who can then produce social media content based on it, which’ll give the public the chance to weigh in on congressional action. The December fightsIt doesn’t just start in January. In December there will be major votes on Senate majority leader, the war funding measure, and perhaps the National Defense Authorization Act, which pro-Israel forces are trying to use to fuse the Israeli and U.S. military industrial bases. When that happens, with your support, Drop Site will be front and center in covering it – and you’ll be able to learn what’s happening in time to do something about it. See you on the Hill, Ryan Grim P.S. Building a newsroom on Capitol Hill that answers to the public, not lobbyists, takes serious investment. If you believe in what we’re building and want to play a bigger role in launching it, email majorgiving@dropsitenews.com or visit our Ways to Give page.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.