I just ran across a newly founded political website called NOTUS, its name fashioned after POTUS, for "News of the United States." In late 2023 another website previewed its launch as a "high-profile nonprofit ... that promises to publish deep reporting and act as a training ground for young reporters."
NOTUS works under the Albritton Journalism Institute and was funded by a $20 million grant from Robert Allbritton, Politico's founding publisher. Right off, the heart palpitates with unease, perceiving a conflict between NOTUS' mission — "deep reporting" — and its principal benefactor — the publisher of Politico, a publication not known for the kind of lengthy, investigative, deep reporting of, let's say, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica.
That's not to knock Politico. ProPublica's nonprofit business model is simply not Politico's model. Fair enough; the latter's model has no incentive to imitate ProPublica's. So let us not be hasty in assessing the newcomer. We shouldn't prejudge.
We shouldn't because also right off, NOTUS' editor in chief assures us that "while others will tell you what’s happening or what you should think about it, we’re focused on bigger questions: Why? Why is Washington the way it is? And what drives the people who make it so?" That is assuring.
But then, a certain unease slips its way back in, for "the most accomplished journalists working in Washington today" are "training the next generation of great journalists" at AJI. Yet still we mustn't prejudge; perhaps with a new sense of nonprofit freedom, today's accomplished journalists will indeed train young journalists to focus on the bigger questions.
So I hastened to NOTUS' main story, titled "What Trump Wants in His Next VP." Among all the topics in all of Washington's gin joints, this one is almost too easy for a political publication set on answering the "bigger questions." What Trump wants is an unhinged Trump clone, one who will bow before his or her office shrine to Dear Leader each evening and vow to violate the Constitution in every requested manner.
Or, a political journalist could shove aside his or her certain knowledge of second-banana despotism and instead seek a source of balanced opinion about this big question. Say, Steve Bannon, whom NOTUS did ask. What's Trump looking for in a VP? "Quality of character," said Bannon. There was no follow-up by the reporter. Oh my. If that was meant as irony, left, as is, to dangle and twist in the reader's dumbfounded mind, the intention failed.
Because NOTUS went on with the kind of straight reporting that sticks to whatever would be handed out in a candidate's press release, ignoring the pregnant awfulness of Trump's frightful realities. Does he want an unhinged clone? No, reports NOTUS, "he has said he wants somebody who would be prepared to take over for him should something happen"; somebody who will "support his 'America First' agenda." Which is what? From NOTUS, not a clue. I guess that's not a "big question."
The publication wasn't yet through with its "deep reporting," however. It also sought out Freedom Caucuser and friend of authoritarianism Rep. Dan Bishop, who mused that "President Trump has transformed a lot of things and about our politics and gotten us focused." That's for damn sure. "And I think maybe what you need is somebody who can fight as hard and as readily as President Trump."
His "transformation" was more of a transmogrification: the soiling of 237 years of a generally successful American political tradition; pushing the world's oldest democracy toward the brink of autocratic destruction. That's on the record for Christ's sake. It's in his speeches, his diatribes and it's right there in his advertised agenda. That's not opinion journalism guilefully masquerading as straight news. It is straight news.
What should have been the focus of NOTUS' piece was left for its close: "Trump critics within the GOP have a more sinister view of what Trump wants. 'At the end of the day, they just want somebody who will do whatever they say ... even if it goes against the law or the Constitution,'" said an anonymous source. Even that, this one small concession to the actual big picture, the publication mangled. Critics don't have a "sinister view" of Trump's wants. They have a view of Trump's sinister wants.
NOTUS' editor in chief somewhat derides those "other" publications that merely "tell us what’s happening." I gather he's not heard of glass houses. He also cheerfully informs us that his website won't tell us "what we should think." With that I have no problem. No respectable publication would be so arrogant. But in place of that must be telling the public the way things are, why they are, and "what drives the people who make it so." All this he does promise — and then fails on all three counts.
It's not self-satisfied opinion to report that the way things are, as noted above, is that we're teetering on the edge of authoritarianism — the wholesale destruction of more than two centuries of democratic progress. Why is that? Because a severely mentally unbalanced candidate for the U.S. presidency is running about even with the protector of democracy. What drives that candidate is enfolded in the preceding sentence: he is severely mentally unbalanced.
That, Mr. Editor, is not opinion or persuasion or an interpretation. It's the way things are. And that's what you should be reporting.
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