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No conspiracy theories. No whitewashing either. Just the facts - about Covid and the mRNAs, Joe Biden's cognitive decline, the war on speech - as best I can deliver them. Stand with me.

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Once upon a time you could (basically) believe elite media outlets like The New York Times. (I know, I worked there for a decade.) Yes, a few topics were off-limits, and the reporters were overwhelmingly Democrats.

But the paper wanted to present the world in a truthful, accurate way. The Times tried to present facts in its news pages, while giving targets of negative articles or investigative reports space to respond without editorializing about those responses.

Basically, the paper trusted readers to draw their own conclusions.

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(And now I’m trusting you to believe my reporting is worth 16 cents a day.)

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No more.

The Times and other major news organizations have never recovered from the shock of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The fact that Trump is leading the race to be the next president only infuriates them more. They no longer view themselves as merely reporting on the plans and actions of powerful people, countries, and companies, even when they don’t like those goals.

In place of presenting facts, they want to shape opinion, even in their news pages.

But reality is messy and complex. Goals that seem worthy - such as preventing anger against China (or Asian-Americans) by reducing discussion that Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a Chinese lab - may lead reporters to shade or even avoid facts they do not like.

Once reporters lose truth - and even more importantly, factual accuracy - as lodestars, they have nothing left.

We’ve seen this pattern again just in the last few hours.

Top news organizations want to criticize Republicans for calling Kamala Harris the “border czar,” though Joe Biden unquestionably put her in charge of many border policies in 2021. So they are complaining about the phrase.

But it turns out they used the same words three years ago. Which in turn led to this bit of insanity today from Axios, a top political news organization:

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What? You’re repudiating your own words because they’re politically inconvenient?

The reason I could break so much news about Covid and the mRNAs on Twitter and Substack during 2020 and 2021 wasn’t that I had a huge staff helping me. It was because nearly the entire media had wrongfooted itself.

I thought maybe that crisis would end when Covid subsided, but the lack of substantive coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline - and now his withdrawal - shows that nothing has changed.

That’s why I - writing from my kitchen on a Saturday morning three wweeks ago, with the kids circling - could break the news that a neurologist had visited the White House over and over since last July, at the invitation of the Navy nurse who supervises and coordinates Biden’s care:

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That story turned out to be too good, and too important, for the Times to ignore. Two days later, the Times followed it (without crediting me).

A lot has happened since then, of course. And I am not the only reporter who is horrified that places like the Times have lost their way.

But I am one of the few who has both a big audience and what might be called classical training. And I am committed to stay within the facts - not to traffic in conspiracy theories or rumor, even when doing so might grow my audience - as well as to be honest and transparent when I make factual errors.

I can’t imagine doing this any other way.

We have a partnership, and I owe you honest work.

If you are a new reader, I hope you will choose to support my reporting. If you are a longtime subscriber, I thank you and hope you will continue to do so. You don’t have to - I am committed to reaching the largest possible audience, and that means using paywalls as sparingly as possible - but I hope you will.

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(Join the independent journalism revolution.)

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Now back to work.