Hi,
This is a newsletter to say thank you.
The best kind of journalism is when both the writer and the reader learn something new along the way, and I have learned so much over the past few months. It’s incredibly rare that such a thing happens, and it requires an editorial freedom and risk-taking approach that is lacking these days.
News is fast: it’s content, it’s a sport, and it’s low margins and high stakes. That applies a pressure that makes news organisations take on fewer and fewer challenges, or risks, and focus instead on feeding the lucrative content/hot take machine.
The Better Politics beat in particular cannot be fruitful under such conditions. One cannot consider all the ways that our political systems can be improved, without taking the time and space to explore the reasons why they are not working, and having the luxury and freedom to propose what can be done to fix them. That space involves making judgements – moral judgements – which to much of the media has been rebranded as "bias".
But without such a moral compass we end up in a world of false equivalence, unable to make a distinction between facts and opinion, between good and bad faith arguments.
The Better Politics beat, for me, has been a safe space from that sort of handwringing, and I thank you for that. It cannot happen without your support. If you have enjoyed reading as much as I have enjoyed writing, please renew your membership today. I would love to continue to learn alongside you.
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