Who Let Me Do This? (Happy Birthday, The Present Age)

The press keeps getting bought. This is the case for a newsletter that can’t be

Five years ago, I quit a steady paycheck at Media Matters to start emailing strangers about why some CNN headline made me want to throw my laptop into Lake Michigan.

I’m still doing it.

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Somewhere in there, The Present Age stopped being a side project and became the thing that pays my bills. So this is a thank-you note. It’s also, fair warning, a sales pitch, because I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. New subscriptions and upgrades are 30% off right now, and I’m going to spend the next few hundred words trying to earn it.

The short version: this newsletter has no owner. Nobody can spike a piece I write, water down a headline after it’s published, or kill a story for being inconvenient to the wrong person. No billionaire, no board, no parent company. Just me and you. That’s the whole arrangement, and it’s the reason this works at all.

What I’ve done with that freedom, mostly, is write about the same handful of things over and over.

The New York Times, for one. When the paper opened 2023 by hiring David French, a columnist who’d co-signed the 2017 Nashville Statement and once worked as an attorney for a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an anti-LGBTQ hate group, I pointed out that he was the second anti-trans voice the opinion section had brought on without a single trans columnist anywhere on staff. They’d let Jennifer Finney Boylan’s column go the year before. The math wasn’t subtle.

Then there’s the trick where outlets turn plain facts into open questions. CNN once ran a headline about Florida barring residents from changing the gender marker on their licenses and tacked on the line “Critics say the policy targets transgender people.” Critics say. As if it were a matter of opinion who that policy targets. I keep coming back to that move, right up through the way fact-checkers spent 2024 rating Project 2025 claims “false” because the document wasn’t technically written by Trump, just by the people around him.

A lot of these five years went to watching billionaires buy the press and then swear they’d keep their hands off it. When the Washington Post’s CEO pushed out his top editor and replaced her with a loyalist, he assured staff the new editor was “free to publish when, how, and what they want to.” Nobody offers that reassurance unless they’ve already made sure the answer will come out right.

And lately, the slop. After Elon Musk’s chatbot started calling itself MechaHitler and posting antisemitic garbage, NBC ran the headline “AI chatbot Grok issues apology for antisemitic posts.” I wrote that Grok apologized for nothing, because Grok is a product. The company that built it issued the statement, and writing it the other way hands Musk a shield he hasn’t earned.

Not all of it has been grim. A year and a half after the first auction collapsed, I got to write that The Onion really is taking over Infowars. Every so often, the bad guys lose one.

Every newsroom with an owner has a pressure point, a place where the right phone call gets results. A president who wants a segment gone calls the billionaire who signs the checks. An advertiser that hates a story pulls its money. A corporate parent with a merger to protect makes sure an editor understands what’s good for their career. That’s not a theory. The editor the Post forced out didn’t leave by accident; somebody up the chain wanted a tamer newsroom and got one.

None of those levers exist here. The chain of command stops at you.

That’s the trade, and I’ll be straight about it: the readers are the only people I answer to. It also means I can’t coast, because the moment you decide I’m phoning it in, you can leave. If enough of you do, this ends. I’ll take that deal over the alternative every single time.

So, the pitch I promised at the top.

If you’ve been reading for free, thank you, and please keep reading. But the paid version is what keeps this a job instead of a hobby, and it’s 30% off for new subscribers and for anyone upgrading from free. Paid gets you everything I publish and the full five-year archive, which is to say, more of what you just read. That’s the hard sell. I don’t do this often, which is probably why I’m bad at it.

And if money’s genuinely tight, email me. I’ve always set aside comp subscriptions for people who want to read and can’t swing it, and I’m not about to stop. I’d rather you read than not.

Anyway. Mostly I just want to say thanks. For reading five years of a newsletter that is, let’s be honest, me being annoyed at how the news gets told. For the corrections when I got something wrong, and for the times you sent a piece to someone who needed it. Media criticism isn’t exactly a day at the beach, and you kept showing up for it.

I wish I could tell you the stuff I cover is getting better. It isn’t. The billionaires aren’t finished, and the headlines aren’t getting more honest. There’ll be plenty to write about a year from now, and I’ll be here writing it. The only reason I can is you.