President Joe Biden talks to reporters at the White House in Washington, D.C., June 28, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuter) |
We've heard it all before.
Know your audience, an excitable kind of reader informs the author of a piece that fails to flatter his pretensions or reinforce her most uncharitable assumptions about her political opponents. Read the room, she'll insist following first contact with a work that challenges and probes. And if these admonitions fall on deaf ears, it's only because their targets don't know what time it is. Principles are all well and good, but only when they are an instrument of utility — preferably the blunt sort that bludgeons dissenters into stupefied submission.
These values — if they can even be called values — are incompatible with National Review's mission. Subordinating principle and courage to the fad of the moment is not really our style. Instead, we choose to buck conformist pressures — and that's something we can keep doing as long as we have your support. That's why we're asking you to contribute to our fall webathon as we strive to reach our $150,000 goal.
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Of course, those who would see National Review make itself into a cog in a political machine mourn our independence because political identity in the modern age is thought to be malleable, to be fluid. Today, it is too often supported not by fixed moral and philosophical moorings but by intragroup status.
Media outlets everywhere are struggling to navigate a landscape in which audiences demand tribal conflict. In this dynamic, victories are ephemeral. They are measured in news cycles, and they prove satisfying only as long as the defeated contritely acknowledge their own trouncing. That kind of triumph is a rare thing these days because that same dynamic establishes incentives to erect elaborate narratives designed to absolve the vanquished of any responsibility for their lots.
Attracting and appealing to fickle audiences who have been trained to expect media venues to provide them not just with information but self-affirmation is only part of the problem afflicting the industry. Its members do not understand their roles and responsibilities.
Should ideological outfits like newspaper editorial boards endorse candidates, or does that act tether those institutions to a politician's agenda? Is it the media's responsibility to agitate for outcomes they regard as auspicious, or should their members strive toward the ideal of objectivity? Is it worth the sacrifice of depth and nuance to appeal to broader audiences who get their news from half-baked conversations between cultural figures whose grasp of the subject matter is tenuous at best?
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National Review prides itself on existing outside of these debates. It is a mission-oriented institution, and that mission does not shift with the political winds because it is itself timeless. In the best tradition of the American press, NR is devoted to the promotion of the highest form of debate. It is not a venue for apple polishers and status seekers. There is no conflict here between reaching out to readers who get their news from print, or podcasts, or video clips posted to social media because our message is unchanging.
The ageless ideas to which conservatives are beholden — the superior efficiency of maximum individual liberty within an ordered society, the conservation of the constitutional arrangement, the promotion of the customary values we were blessed to inherit, and the preservation of the United States as a force for good on the world stage — are of inestimable worth.
We know you subscribe to these beliefs, but we cannot continue in this work without your support. Your contribution to the cause in any amount helps us continue the fight. We are forever grateful to you for your generosity.
Cheers, Noah Rothman Senior Writer National Review |
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