This news prompted some thoughts on the media startup ecosystem… I started a media outlet from nothing — quite literally nothing at all — 5 years ago. It’s grown into an award-winning 16-person newsroom. As a subscriber-funded publication, we didn’t have the advantage of oligarch funding, panels of credentialed Brooklyn/DC media elites as initial contributors, nor this kind of laudatory media industry press when we launched. Hell, we barely get attribution when news outlets pilfer our reporting and depict it as their own. We have to DIY everything ourselves knowing we’re pushing a rock up a hill. I am proud of what The Lever has done, even as the work and stress involved has aged me and likely shortened my own life. But the discrepancy between what it takes to go through the slog of the non-oligarch route versus the easy street of the oligarch route is a reminder of why the media ecosystem constantly preferences the oligarch perspective. The playing field is tilted — like everything in America — by big money. An industry that makes it on one hand a painful slog to do accountability journalism from non-oligarch perspectives and on the other hand a lucrative joyride of privilege and professional approbation to do punditry that worships oligarchy is a system that will mostly produce the information miasma we’re all now trapped in. I see people sometimes get mad at us when we ask readers to pitch in and become paying subscribers. I tell them that the alternative to reader-supported media is what we have now — and if they’re happy with that, then fine. I’m not happy with it. But five years into the thankless work of trying to build something better - as gratified as I am by our success - I remain unsure whether a new media paradigm can be constructed. Clearly, the forces that built the existing information dystopia we’re trapped in are heavily investing in continuing to tone police and ideologically regulate the discourse so that it stays within the comfortable parameters of corporatism and neoliberalism - and they will be continually celebrated and well-funded for that work like they are this morning. I actually wish The Argument well — I like reading stuff that I disagree with and that challenges my thinking. But I think we need to take moments like this — with all the self-congratulation and media industry adulation as seen here — to understand just how rigged the game really is for those who speak for power and money, and against those who try to represent a different worldview. Onward.