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It feels like hardly a month goes by when we don’t hear about another legacy magazine, newspaper, or other media property closing up shop or firing a bunch of its workers. That’s a far fall from the middle of the 20th century, when newspapers accounted for almost 1 percent of US GDP (the figure today is closer to 0.10 percent). There’s no denying it: the “media landscape” today looks more and more like a wasteland, and support for original reporting and research and a more diverse array of opinions is disappearing fast.
This means it is increasingly hard to make a living thinking and writing about what’s going on in this world. And that’s not even to mention the longer-term decline of local news. The result, as Ross Barkan has observed, is increasing consolidation and concentration of media, leading to a narrowing of perspectives and sources and a less informed public.
For obvious reasons, this situation is bad news for a democratic society. But it is particularly bad news for the left. Our political project depends on taking apart the dominant ideas, which are, to paraphrase Karl Marx, always the ideas of the ruling class. And our project depends too on sketching out a positive vision of a better world and the strategy needed to win it. Because capitalists are the ones who own the remaining media and tech empires and the ones who fund think tanks and elite private universities, they exert a profound influence on the information people consume.
This leads to a predictable bias against left-wing politicians, movements, and policy ideas, and in general a tendency to side with the interests of business over that of labor. (FAIR does a good job tracking this sort of bias.) This pro-capitalist slant takes different forms, of course, ranging from the rabid right-wing version you’ll find on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal opinion page to the liberal variant of pro-business, anti-left bias you’ll see on CNN or in the New York Times. At the end of the day though, all corporate media is reliably anti-socialist.
In days of old, left-wing political parties had a robust party press that could counter the lies, distortions, and omissions of capitalist media. The newspapers produced by labor, socialist, and communist parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reached a mass audience, and were an essential source of news and analysis for their left-leaning readers.
This is true even in the United States, where left parties never broke through as they did in Europe or much of the rest of the world. Newspapers affiliated with Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party of America (SPA) were published in cities across the country; the biggest was the Midwest weekly Appeal to Reason, which at its height claimed a circulation of over 760,000. Also of note was the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper based in New York City that was read by tens of thousands of American Jewish socialists during the SPA’s golden age.

In a different era, the two of us would have gone to work — we like to think — as writers for one of these papers. That’s not the world we live in today, and we spend our working time elsewhere. But we would like to spend more time on our writing, and we’re hoping to raise a bit of money from this Substack to help make that happen. Money we make from Substack will help both of us spend less time on tutoring and other side gigs in the future, and more time chasing after the analysis and ideas that’ll help you understand what’s going on in the world and what we on the left can do about it.
We’re not introducing a paywall; we want to keep sharing our content here for free plus updates from our writing elsewhere. We’ve been really excited to see the progress so far. Since launching in November, we’ve signed up over 1,000 subscribers (and counting)! But if you want to kick in $8 a month — the price of an average drink in most big cities in Joe Biden’s America — to buy us some time to keep writing and thinking about the left and the future, we’d appreciate it.
Either way, in the next few months we’ve got some great new articles coming to your inbox. You can expect more of Neal’s thoughts on left electoral strategy and the Democratic Party, and more reflections from Nick on moral philosophy and existential concerns from a socialist perspective. We’ll also continue to share and offer additional comments on the work we’re publishing elsewhere. And we hope to keep reading your thoughts and questions in the comments section!