Every president wants favorable press coverage. Most feel a surprising level of grievance when they don’t get it. Donald Trump is singular in using the powers of his office to force news organizations to bend to his will. But when is it beyond friendly or fawning coverage, or always giving the president the benefit of the doubt? At the gym a couple days ago I watched the soon-to-be-gobbled-up CNN doing a news segment on gas prices with an energy industry analyst. They’re not the only ones talking about gas prices. But the tone of the segment seemed out of sync with a lot of other press coverage. It occurred to me that what Trump wants, distinctly if not uniquely, is a kind of spell preservation as much as good coverage or fawning per se. He governs the country by a kind of manic coaxing which is at war with short-term memory and thrives on the ability to keep as many people fixated on the super dramatic crisis of the moment without remembering that it was preceded by an endless litany of other crises with similar branding.

In most ways, being a majority reader-funded news operation is an obviously good thing. However, at TPM we’ve always taken care that we are not contributing to a hierarchical news ecosystem. To address that, several years ago we started giving away Community-Supported Memberships free of charge. We also give away free memberships to students.

We talk a lot about how readers fund everything we do. It’s how we can afford to hire reporters. It’s how we can produce a podcast. It’s how we can host events. Memberships, along with the TPM Journalism Fund, also allow us to build an accessible AND sustainable news operation. And you need both.

Reader NC here wrote in to thank us, but really his membership is made possible by all of you. (We’re sharing the below note with his permission). If you are not yet a member, I hope you’ll consider joining now during our Membership Drive.

Greetings!

I had been a TPM Prime member since the very beginning when I reached out to your team a couple of years ago to request a free Prime membership. The mission-driven coworking business that my wife and I had spent 15 years buiding with great care, deep passion, and our family savings, had been capsized by the covid pandemic. Not so much a casualty of Schumpeter’s creative destruction as a victim of Taleb’s black swan, we were nonetheless broke. With my beloved TPM membership on the household chopping block, you switched me over to a free membership–no questions asked.

Now that we’re back on our feet, I switched over to the paid, annual Prive AF membership. As a citizen and a customer, I say this with utmost sincerity: Thank you.

But as a fellow entrepreneur and business owner? Forget about it. That is next-level respect, the respect I have for the business side. It’s hard enough running a small business, much less a small business that deliberately eschews its industry’s main source of revenue (monetizing reader eyeballs via third parties) because it would compromise the editorial independence that is the main driver of customer value. And you’re a union shop. Ka-pow! 

With warmest regards and sincere thanks,