For those of you who receive The Dispatch, I want to thank you for the responses to my question about your news consumption habits which I included in Friday’s email. I’ve gotten between three and four hundred of your replies so far. I really can’t express how valuable your comments and replies are. They’re very interesting and gratifying to me personally to read. But more importantly, they are really, really valuable for our ability to make decisions about how we run the site and, increasingly, how we operate and communicate with you beyond just the website itself. They amount to audience research, though a much more personal form of that than the phrase usually describes.

As I said, there’s more than three hundred of them. So I’ve only gotten part of the way through them. I think I’ve replied to all the ones I’ve read, at least to the point of acknowledging. With some I have follow up questions and with some of you I’ve already exchanged a few emails back and forth. I’m going to try to get to all of them over the next couple days.

Thank you.

Since I spend time, for better or worse, swimming in the swill of right wing influencers and Trumpists, I’m often able to see things before they go fully mainstream — or rather before their existence gets picked up in mainstream media. Just over the last few days there’s been a burst of claims that something is not quite right about the Ukaine War, that the whole thing might be made up. Perhaps it’s a potemkin war. Maybe the Ukrainians are just crisis actors, as we sometimes hear claimed about the victims of mass shootings in the United States. The “questions” are characteristically vague and open-ended, designed to sow doubt without stipulating to any clearly disprovable claim.

The particular claim or question is, where are the pictures? Why isn’t there more war reporting as we’ve seen with every other war. How is it world leader after world leader is able to visit Kyiv in relative safety?