The Conservatives Trying to Ditch Fake News

Read: Actually, conversations are bad

The early numbers—and they are early—have been encouraging. As of this week, Hayes said they have sold nearly 400 “lifetime memberships” at $1,500 a pop, and another 3,500 annual subscriptions for $100. Their three main newsletters each have about 50,000 subscribers, and their flagship podcast briefly cracked Apple’s Top 100 news podcasts this month.

And, in a promising sign of relevance, The Dispatch is already proving somewhat polarizing within the conservative intelligentsia. While the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently praised French’s writing, The American Conservative has attacked the outlet for its ideological bent, declaring it “warmed-over neoconservative news.”

Still, Mark Hemingway, a conservative journalist who writes for RealClearInvestigations, told me the outlet’s reach would likely be limited by its Trump-averse posture. For all the attention Never Trump voices receive from the mainstream media, he said, readers on the right simply aren’t interested: “There’s absolutely zero market for it.”

Recent history is littered with cautionary tales about failed attempts to reform the conservative media. In 2009, Tucker Carlson was famously booed during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference when he defended the journalistic values of The New York Times, and suggested that the right should be emulating the paper. Conservative journalists, he said, should “go out there and find what is happening … not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media, but gather news themselves.”

The next year, Carlson launched The Daily Caller. The site would, he declared, have an old-fashioned journalistic mission: producing stories “that add to the sum total of known facts about politics and government.” But even as he hired promising young reporters, Carlson seemed aware of how market pressures could derail the project. His biggest fear, he told The New Republic at the time, was that “you could wind up with a page only about porn, executions, and Sarah Palin every day.”

A decade later, it’s safe to say that The Daily Caller has not become the conservative answer to The New York Times. Though it still publishes some original reporting on politics, those stories are mixed in with a sea of clickbait, trolling, Scarlett Johansson slideshows, and periodic race-baiting. (In 2018, my former colleague Rosie Gray reported that one of the site’s editors had written pseudonymously for a white-supremacist website.)

Given this trajectory, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the incentives in conservative media can actually support a project like The Dispatch. Have audiences on the right simply been conditioned to expect validation—and nothing else—from their news?

When I asked Goldberg about the case of the Caller, he conceded that “the pursuit of short-term profit can be very seductive.” But, he quickly added, “I want to give the most generous theory of the case, which is that the times needed to ripen more.”

The Dispatch is betting—somewhat improbably—that conservatives are ready now. Pointing to the success of magazines like The New Yorker, Hayes told me, “You’ll never convince me there’s not a similar audience on the right.”

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.