The info wars: nothing matters more, and there's so much more we could be doing

We all hate the media. It's something people have always griped about — their liberal bias, etc. — and they've only gotten worse. Many people have taken to cope by dismissing them as “legacy media,” as if they've been replaced and lost all their power, but that's wishful nonsense. Mainstream news media remains very relevant, and very powerful.

What matters more than control of public information? The media has the power to decide what you know about what's going on in the world, what you should care about, and how you should see things. All this they infect with their bias, the root of our grievance with them. And they have power beyond that too, hostile powers, that they subject those they see as opposed to their politics to. Things like the cancellation mobs they love to incite and sic on people, or biased “fact-checks” that are nothing of the like.

So the question then becomes, what's stopping us from just doing what they do ourselves, taking all this from them? It's not just money, that's less important than people assume. Call me crazy but I believe that effectively all it takes is being people's objective, trusted source of information, and finding a way to provide them with that. The fundamental reason conservative media has always failed at this is that it's never managed to not just be “conservative media,” nakedly partisan and overwhelmingly dumb.

Here you can anticipate an objection: “But what about mainstream media and all their lies? We don't trust them, so how come they get away with it?” Well, they have a lot of advantages, and in all fairness, their bias isn't quite like the right's. They're more professional, they're competent researchers and rarely retract stories. And with their bias they swim in unison in a school of other similarly-biased media and institutions.

We on the other hand have no choice. We can't give them the rope to hang us. We have to be objective to be credible. (And why wouldn't we want to be anyway?) Objectivity doesn’t mean covering the news through a lens of indifferent centrism, it just means being able to report on and assess things as honestly and accurately as possible. That doesn't come easy to most people in politics, but it can be done.

How though can we cover the news? Having millions of dollars and a packed newsroom behind you would certainly help, but it's not actually necessary. This site leverages the idea of a Drudge Report-like news aggregator, with improvements, to cover as much of the news as possible, in as timely a manner as can be done with the limited resources available. There are also hub pages for ongoing news stories and issues for intensive coverage of one big thing in the news. That's this site though. Even just a blog would help — someone reporting on one specific thing they know well. We're only held back by our capabilities and lack of effort.

That's the producer side of things though. Obviously not everyone has to actually make something. We need readers for all of this and just being an audience helps.