Talking Points Memo

November 13 will mark Talking Points Memo's 25th anniversary. Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can actually see Josh Marshall's first ever post here as it appeared two-and-half decades ago. As you scroll down to that first entry (remember everything being reverse chronological?) you may be hit by a wave of nostalgia, perhaps a pang of longing for the internet as it used to be.

As one of the very first digitally native news sites, TPM has been around for virtually every era of online publishing. And with some foresight and some fortune, we've weathered many storms and are proud to say we're stronger now than ever. One of the ways we've chosen to celebrate the occasion is to publish a series of 25 essays by 25 prominent journalists about the history of digital media. Each essay examines an important moment or idea that helps understand the last 25 years of our industry.

We dubbed the series Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls, which is itself a pithy encapsulation of things. Josh Marshall wrote the introduction: The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business.

We've published five essays so far and the authors are likely familiar. Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker, examines What Made Blogging Different? Nathan Robinson, founder, publisher, and editor of Current Affairs, tells us Why I Founded a Print Magazine At the Peak of Digital Media Mania. Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin and president of The Nation, asks Can Substack Recover the Blogosphere We Lost? David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, discusses how DC's Access Journalists Turned the News Into a Luxury Good. Max Rivlin-Nader, co-publisher of Hell Gate, writes that The Future of Local News Is Making People Pay For It. The rest of the pieces will be rolling out through our anniversary week, so stay tuned for more.

As Josh's intro explains, many of the digital media sites that have come and gone, or maybe continue to exist in zombie form, suffered from a kind of identity crisis. They were run like tech companies with tech company expectations. We've always known at TPM that we are a journalism business. We report the news, we provide analysis, and we curate what's important. We've worked hard to avoid the pitfalls in Dayen's essay — the news can't become a luxury good only for the well-off — while acknowledging the reality of Rivlin-Nader's piece: revenue from readers is the path to long-term sustainability.

Whether you've been reading for 25 years, 25 weeks or 25 hours, we'd appreciate your support as a member. We'll never lose sight of what we do: Journalism.

Did you know that you don't really ever have to pay to read TPM? We'd appreciate it if you did because that is how we get paid and have a life and do journalism. But you don't really have to pay. The only thing we have paywalled right now is The Backchannel which is Josh Marshall's  newsletter. 

Do you know how hard it is to make a sales pitch when we're giving everything away for free? Almost as hard as it is staying in business, but that is the job. 

To make matters worse, let's say you really need The Backchannel. You can't live without Josh's musings. The free podcast and the other ed blog posts and all the other news (that is very expensive to produce btw) is not enough. Well, even in those cases: We literally have free memberships. So you can still get it for free!

You might be thinking, well sure but the news is mostly funded by advertising. And then I'd ask you what year you thought it was. Ad rates are through the floor. Unless you are one of these right-wing sites comfortable slinging every sleazy supplement known to man or you want to have 9,000 ads on every single page, then the ads are not enough. 

You do have to pay if you want to comment on articles. That is a privilege. But you could always just email us for free. You could follow us on social and tweet or skeet or whatever the platform-specific verb is. So once again, you really don't need to pay us at all.

But here's what I think: You should anyway. You should become a member and pay us whatever you can afford (don't pay us more than you can afford, we're not greedy. That's why we have the free memberships afterall).

We report on important things, and outlets that report on important things are increasingly in the crosshairs. Josh Kovensky reported this week on National Security Presidential Memorandum (NPSM-7), which, among other things:

...directs law enforcement to consider "extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality," as well as "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity" alongside such ambitions as "the overthrow of the United States Government." 

In other words, they are coming for people and ideas they do not like. 

Needless to say, most, if not all, of the mainstream media is ill-equipped to combat attacks like this. Mainstream media is big business and big business is about making money. Whereas I am tasked with the impossible job of making enough money to fund high-quality journalism while giving it away for free, Paramount is acquiring the Free Press and putting a fear-mongering  rube like Bari Weiss in charge of the news.

We're committed to real journalism over here, and we want it to reach as many people as possible. That's why so much of what we do is freely available. We have more than 35,000 people who pay us anyway because they think it's important we exist (and they probably like the member templates with fewer or even no ads). So, why don't you sign up for a year using the discount below and then in a year from now, if you think it was money well spent, if we did important work in that time, you can keep supporting us. If you don't, well, it's easy to cancel. I think you'll stick around though. Our retention rates are through the roof.

Last week, America lost a real one, as the kids say. Robert Redford was undoubtedly one of the towering figures in the history of cinema, having starred in classics like The Sting, The Candidate, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, The Natural, and so many more. He even gave us one of the all-time memes.
 

And of course, Redford played Bob Woodward in All The President's Men, the film adaptation of the book by the same name written by Woodard and Carl Bernstein about their reporting on Watergate. We'll assume this requires no additional context or explanation.
 

I often wonder what impact All The President's Men had on American journalism, along with the perception of what journalism is and what journalism ought to be. Journalism is many things. Perhaps the most fundamental,  broad definition is the recording and transmission of information. The world's first "newspapers" were mostly designed to help the royal courts of one place understand what was going on in the royal courts of another place. Other newspapers might list basic information — how much things cost, what was going on in wars, things like that. The idea of holding the government accountable, exposing corruption — things modern readers associate with journalism — didn't come along until much later. So-called "Muckrakers" like Ida Tarbell, who reported on John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, didn't come around until the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they helped end the Gilded Age. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the term "Watchdog Journalism" gained common currency.
 

It's important to keep this context in mind because for most of recorded history, journalism and journalists were not in the business of holding anyone accountable. They were in the business of selling people information that was valuable. Or they were in the business of selling ad space, which meant it behooved newspaper moguls to sell as many papers as they could, however they could. 

In other words, if you find a newsroom that is committed to reporting on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust, you should support that newsroom however you can because they are abnormal. It may seem like this is a basic tenet of journalism and that this is what all journalists set out to do, but that is, unfortunately, a romanticisation of the craft. Perhaps that ought to be what all journalism is about. But the fact is that it's often been the job of the independent and even dissident media to hold the powerful accountable and highlight corruption.

TPM, fortunately for you, is one of the newsrooms that exists to do this kind of work. We live in corrupt times. It's somewhat fashionable to say so. But TPM's been on this for the entirety of its 25 year history. As David Kurtz pointed out in yesterday's Morning Memo:

Nearly 20 years ago, TPM cut its chops on the 2006-07 U.S. attorney scandal. The Bush II-era firings of Republican U.S. attorneys for failing to be aggressive enough in pursuing bogus voter fraud charges led to congressional hearings and eventually the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.

It all seems almost quaint now by the standards of Donald Trump.

Redford, I think, would have agreed. Though he only played a journalist on the big screen, he was known to pen an op-ed from time to time. In 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris saying,  "I don't know about you, but I don't hear anyone asking to hobble our government, toss science out the window and slam the brakes on climate action. Nobody, that is, except Trump and his billionaire buddies, who want to take us back to the days of a political spoils system that served corporate robber barons and left our kids to pay the price."

Journalism alone can't stop the return of the robber barons, but stopping the robber barons will absolutely require good journalism. We hope you'll support ours.

I'm not sure precisely when it started, but for the entirety of my professional career, and stretching back to when I was still a journalism student, our field has been going through a reckoning about "objectivity" in journalism. The rules that took hold in prior decades, which seemed to many eternal and without origin, stipulated that journalists' task was to entirely remove their perspective from reporting and to present just the facts. Any hint of subjective analysis, interpretation, or deduction was, this thinking went, strictly forbidden. Journalists in this sense were not so much human beings doing a job aided by their faculty of reason so much as recording devices.

TPM's never been like this. As we state in our mission, "The goal of our journalism is neither balance nor objectivity but accuracy, fairness and a fundamental honesty with our readers and members at all times."

Our founder Josh Marshall was recently interviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review to discuss TPM's 25th anniversary, which is coming up in November. He was asked if TPM has stayed true to its founding vision, a question that Josh said was difficult to answer because in the early years of the site he wasn't quite sure what he was doing. In a subsequent post about the interview — TPM has never shied away from meta self-reflection — he said there are at least three things that make up TPM.

1. You can't cover political news well unless you're familiar with and care about the substance.

2. Good political reporting should be something you're dying to read. It shouldn't be a chore.

3. Fundamental honesty with readers.

Josh expands on all of these in greater detail. It's worth reading the full post. If you've ever read our mission statement, these ideas all appear there as well. But it's the first point that I want to elaborate on here.

We used to break out our reporting on DC into its own section, "TPM DC," and that section had its own tagline: "In DC, not of it." It's a motto we still keep in mind, even if it doesn't appear on the site. Among the reasons we are not "of it" is the tendency for DC news outlets — and increasingly, any mainstream news outlet that covers DC at all — to vomit all over themselves in a misguided attempt at appearing "impartial" or "objective." "Objectivity" is located somewhere between the various poles of American politics. (The problem here should be obvious: the poles of American politics, and whatever midpoint exists between those poles, don't necessarily have a fixed relationship, or any relationship at all, with the truth.) In the formulation of many DC publications, politics is a sport with winners and losers. The political parties are akin to professional organizations. The consequences of legislation and policy making are not really the point. Being in power is an end in and of itself.

Compare that vision of the world with how Kate Riga reports on what lies ahead with regard to trans rights this Supreme Court term:

"There, they hope to win permission to discriminate against trans people even more broadly, as they goad the Court to state decisively that trans Americans do not get heightened legal protections […]

"The Court's docket will fill further when the new term begins, likely with many cases stemming from the Trump administration's dismantling of the federal government, its imposition of armed federal troops in blue cities, its extralegal ICE raids and detentions. And for many terms now, the Court has embraced its role as frequent culture warrior on the topics that most inflame its political allies, dealing them wins on gun rights, abortion restriction and the disenfranchisement of minorities. But this term's focus on anti-LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans, attacks reveals the extent to which the Court is walking in ever-tighter lockstep with the cultural right and devoting precious docket space to its current fixations."  

TPM's journalism is guided by a basic principle: Politics affects real people. Laws and policies and court decisions have real world consequences, and the consequences are not a mystery. Government actions make people's lives better or worse. Feigning impartiality in the name of objectivity simply results in dishonesty and a lack of transparency with readers. At TPM, we care about what the government is doing because what the government is doing affects people. That's the entire point of journalism, and it's what makes TPM TPM.