Welcome to 2021
Dear Dispatch readers:
Welcome to a new moment in American politics.
We have a new administration, new Cabinet members, new agency heads. There’s a new Congress, too. But the country faces many of the same problems: the pandemic, economic uncertainty, growing national debt, security threats—both external and internal.
Among the biggest of these challenges: a polluted information environment, filled with agenda-driven reporting, outrage journalism, partisan boosterism, and—far too often—fake news and conspiracies. It’s harder and harder to separate good information from bad, to know which sources to trust and which ones to ignore, which outlets have hidden agendas and which ones tell it to you straight.
We founded The Dispatch to fight this problem. We provide straightforward reporting and fact-driven analysis. We’re conservative, but never partisan. We provide light, not heat. And we are happy to slow down the chaotic news cycle when doing so allows us to provide the context and understanding often obscured by the hot-take journalism so prevalent today.
We’re committed to telling our readers the truth—to providing information, not affirmation. It’s the right way to do journalism, of course, but it’s also smart business. Playing it straight enhances the trust we have with our members. They come to know we’ve put in the work it takes to uncover the truth and that we’ll provide it in an unvarnished way. It’s why nearly everyone who signed up for a Dispatch membership when we first offered them a year ago is sticking with us. We made a promise, and we delivered.
Here’s what we said when we launched The Dispatch in October 2019:
We don’t apologize for our conservatism. Some of the best journalism is done when the author is honest with readers about where he or she is coming from, and some of the very worst journalism hides behind a pretense of objectivity and the stolen authority that pretense provides. When we provide analysis, we will endeavor to describe the opposing points of view with honesty and charity. When we report, we will do so without concern for whether the facts prove inconvenient to any party or politician. We’ll test our own assumptions and, we hope, challenge our readers to do the same. We expect people to disagree, but we hope they will see that we come to our positions honestly, without some unstated agenda.
This will inevitably run afoul of partisan agendas. That’s not only okay, it’s by design. We believe telling the truth is always its own defense.
That’s what we’ve done over the past year. I’m especially proud of the work our small team has done covering the events of the past few weeks. On the night of January 6, we broke a story about the president’s top lawyer pressuring freshman Sen. Tommy Tuberville to delay the electoral vote count. Just as Congress was preparing to reconvene, Rudy Giuliani left a voicemail for Tuberville—but on the voicemail of another senator. We got it and published a story about it.
We had two reporters covering the rally that day, and they collaborated to produce gripping on-the-ground coverage of the chaos. We published a widely read day-after recap in The Morning Dispatch about the events that led us to write our first-ever staff editorial. And then there was contributor Yuval Levin on what the riot revealed, the Dispatch Podcast team breaking down and making sense of all that transpired, and the fact-checking team swatting down the rumors, lies, and distortions.
We have a lot to offer. One of our main objectives is to make your news consumption easy and pleasant. So we will never subject our members to annoying pop-up ads, cheap clickbait, or frustrating auto-play audio. You choose what you get from us. Want one email each weekday to summarize and contextualize the news? Just take The Morning Dispatch. Want more detailed news and commentary, subject-specific expertise, in-depth analysis? Sign up for any—or all!—of our subject-specific newsletters, from Congress to campaigns to Christianity to the economy to foreign policy. You control what you get from us on your My Account page. (And if you have questions about how to do any of that, drop us an email at members@thedispatch.com and we’ll walk you through it.)
We’re thrilled that you’ve decided to give us a shot and we hope that you’re enjoying the reporting and commentary we provide for free. But as we enter this new political moment, I’m asking you to join us for 2021 by becoming a member. I’ll leave you with a note we received last week:
I’m a lifelong Independent and I almost always split my voting across parties. My main source of news has been NPR … Thank you for The Dispatch! I love your morning newsletter and my two favorite podcasts are The Dispatch and Advisory Opinions. And I really appreciate David French on Sunday. I don’t know if I would have discovered you on my own except that Mr. Goldberg is occasionally interviewed by NPR as a conservative voice, and I found some common ground with his words. All this to say that I can appreciate the conservative voice and opinion so much more because of your work. In fact, I agree with many of your conservative ideas. I am trying to stay hopeful for this country and that we all stop dehumanizing the “other side” or even the “third side” of Trump folks. It starts with me, and with your type of news organization, you are also leading the way for others like me who are partyless. Thank you so much.
—Dispatch reader, January 2020
Onward,
Steve Hayes
Founder and CEO
P.S.: We’d love to hear what you think of The Dispatch. Feel free to send us a note at members@thedispatch.com.
