Welcome to The Dispatch
Fact-driven reporting and the context necessary to understand it
We are a new digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles.
Why are we doing this, and why are we doing it the way we are? The internet puts an unimaginable amount of information at our fingertips, but it makes knowledge and wisdom harder to grasp. Social media connects people in meaningful ways but also manages to make it more difficult for us to understand each other. It is less a World Wide Web linking us all together than an accelerant, quickening trends long in the works. Our confidence in the institutions that once anchored us was declining even before the internet became a fixture in our lives, but its arrival has only made us feel even less fixed to a common landscape.
Nowhere is this more true than in the world of journalism. Not only do we have too much noise and not enough signal, but the signals we should be heeding are often discounted as noise and the noise is marketed as prophecy. A great deal of excellent journalism is still available to those who want it, but one has to seek it out like a tourist trying to find a chapel amid the neon signs of some dystopian red-light district.
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.
Most of our content is now available only to paying members. We don’t want to subject our readers to auto-play videos, pop-up or pop-under ads, or any of the clickbait boxes that even respectable news outlets use to monetize actual fake news.
We hope that you’ll consider investing in our work and joining us.