And we're off

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE...

I hope you’ll bear with me.

This newsletter will start with a focus on Covid, as you might expect given my Twitter feed. I want to offer an update on what we now know about the vaccines, for example. The topic is too long to tweet properly, but I don’t have time to write a full booklet about it. A newsletter seems like a good alternative.

But over the next few months and years I hope to be able to offer you something broader.

Ideally, Unreported Truths will become a genuine journalistic alternative to elite media outlets like The New York Times, which have become overtly ideological in the last several years – at the cost of the accuracy of their reporting.

It will offer factual reporting not just on Covid but crucial stories the Times and other left-leaning outlets will barely touch – like the huge increase in murders since 2019 – and incisive analysis of ones they do. It will be skeptical, not simply contrarian for the sake of being so.

Unreported Truths will try to avoid covering news that you can easily get elsewhere, or issues where the stories the elites are telling each other roughly match reality. For example, the Internal Revenue Service really has been gutted since the 1980s, and as a result many superrich people and companies have found ways to pay almost no taxes.

Luckily, given the state of the media these days, those boundaries still give me lots of ground to cover. And I hope that with your support I will soon be able to hire other writers to help.

I want to believe we are entering a new age of citizen-funded and independent journalism which will range from instant reporting through Twitter to daily and weekly analysis through Substack to self-published books through Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.

There’s reason to be optimistic. The Internet has made collecting and disseminating information much easier than it used to be. When I started out as a reporter at the Denver Post in 1994, I had to look up documents from publicly traded companies on microfiche (check it out, kids, it’s a thing!) and travel to courthouses to pull even basic docket information.

These days I can do much more, much more quickly. And I can get paid for my work, too – whatever I think of Amazon’s censorship policies, I am grateful to have them printing and distributing the Unreported Truth booklets.

But the forces against independent journalists are enormous, too. The gatekeepers of legacy media hate us – and I don’t think hate is too strong a word, based on the way they have treated me and others in the last two years. And they fear us.

They are used to being able to present a narrative and dismiss anyone who disagrees as foolish at best, a conspiracist at worst (and often racist, too!). But those attacks don’t work against people who can present facts that challenge the stories they spin. So they have turned to an even more powerful force, the technology companies that control the Information Age, for help with censorship.

The censors have mostly left me alone so far. But I’m conscious that can change at any moment.

So over the next couple of years, I’ll be trying to build a newsroom – or at least present original reporting and analysis from many different sources – on the fly, while places like the Atlantic try to destroy me and the tech giants loom in the background.

Like I said, I hope you’ll bear with me.

Should be a fun ride.