Talking Points Memo

Last week Rick Perlstein published an essay at the American Prospect titled "The Independent Media Hustle" about TPM. The essay is in part a profile about Josh Marshall and in part a lamentation of the media ecosystem generally. It's a good essay. For our purposes, it's a good essay because Perlstein makes the case for why TPM should exist and why people should support it. It comes down to two main things: 

1. In addition to the daily updates, TPM is a repository for historical information about important political topics, especially when it comes to the rise of right-wing extremism in America. 

2. The TPM business is sound and that is a rare thing that is worthy of support.

For example, Perlstein says that while researching both the Tea Party and the Oathkeepers, the paper of record, The New York Times, fell vastly short of the mark. In the case of the Tea Party, Perlstein says, The Times essentially told the story the leaders of the Tea Party wanted them to tell, "a spontaneous outpouring of nonpartisan anger from ordinary Middle Americans at the alleged fiscal irresponsibility of the Obama administration."

In the case of the Oathkeepers — who TPM has covered doggedly for years — The Times had a different problem: They simply did not cover them at all: A scant one mention. Perlstein writes:

It was a pretty striking example of how a supposed Newspaper of Record actively renders it impossible for ordinary news consumers to form an accurate picture of what was going on in front of their noses. In actual fact, the second group was a veritable auxiliary of the first. Rhodes grew it by making pitches for new members from rostrums at Tea Party rallies.

Lucky for us, there was another publication where a historian can go back and pluck real-time evidence of that Tea Party/Oath Keeper alliance from those years. If you are interested in how the American right went insane, TalkingPointsMemo.com is your actual publication of record, compiling a bountiful archive of the ways "extremism" and "mainstream" merged in the history of the Republican Party from the dawn of President George W. Bush to the present. It was born, in 2000, at a time of new vessels and styles of writing about American politics. It could have become a model for the rest of the news media. It did not.

Independent media matters for a lot of reasons but chief among them is a willingness, a desire even to muck about on the fringes of society — where future challenges fester and metastasize. Society needs journalists willing to work outside the norms of conventional wisdom, outside the system because challenges to institutions and norms will originate outside of that wisdom and outside of that system. That's just how history works.

This dovetails with TPM's survival. Herd mentality in journalism is not limited to the reporting, it infects the business minds as well. At TPM though, we have never followed the masses.

"I asked how TPM was able to do it, and why its success hasn't found more imitators." Perlstein wrote. "The tale I heard was sufficiently labyrinthine that the second part answered itself. It would require another full column to do it justice."

The business is hard. Journalism is hard. But at TPM, we've hit on some keys to success:

1. Cover important, interesting political figures who are being undercovered (or covered badly) by mainstream outlets.

2. There is no one cool trick. There is no panacea, no one-size-fits-all solution, no pivot-to-whatever: There is just doing good journalism that appeals to readers. That's the key to the business.

But don't take our word for it, take Perlstein's.