The Martyr’s Badge:
How the Left Defunded Itself
On the toxic conflation of suffering with credibility, the right’s forty-year campaign to capture the information landscape, the awkward question of the millionaire comedians, and the nonprofit news experiments that point toward what comes next.
Norman Finkelstein is seventy-two years old. He has a PhD from Princeton. He has written ten books. He teaches international law. He was denied tenure at DePaul University after a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz. He has been effectively blacklisted from American academic employment for nearly two decades. He produces his analysis from an apartment in Brooklyn, largely unfunded, on a Substack. This is considered, in certain circles on the left, a kind of credential.
It should be considered a scandal.
Not the blacklisting — that is a scandal of a different kind, well-documented and widely understood. The scandal is that the left has internalized the deprivation as proof of authenticity. That suffering has become a badge. That the refusal or inability to build sustainable material infrastructure for intellectual and media work is treated not as a structural failure but as evidence of moral seriousness. As if getting paid for the work would contaminate it. As if the apartment in Brooklyn is the point.
There is a pattern on the left — visible across anarchists, abolitionists, democratic socialists, and left-liberals alike — that conflates material deprivation with political credibility. The logic runs something like this: if you are suffering for your work, your work must be authentic. If you are comfortable, your work is suspect. If you are profiting, you have been captured.
This logic has consequences. It means that the people producing the most rigorous analysis — the Finkelsteins, the independent journalists on the ground in Gaza, the researchers tracking deportation pipelines, the courthouse observers documenting ICE enforcement — operate without institutional support, without healthcare, without the basic material stability that would allow them to sustain and expand their work. And the communities that benefit from that work enforce the deprivation by treating any attempt to build financial sustainability as a betrayal.
Nobody asks whether an MSF logistician deserves a salary. Nobody questions whether a UNHCR protection officer should work for free to prove their commitment. But the moment that same logic applies to independent media, suddenly compensation becomes evidence of corruption.
The humanitarian sector understood decades ago that sustained, high-quality work requires material support. Professional humanitarian workers are paid. They have contracts, benefits, organizational infrastructure. The professionalization of humanitarian action is understood as a prerequisite for effective response — not a compromise of principle. The Sphere Standards don’t include a provision requiring that aid workers demonstrate suffering to validate their commitment.
But independent media, independent research, independent editorial work — the information infrastructure that movements depend on to function — is expected to run on volunteerism, moral purity, and the occasional GoFundMe. When someone in this space earns money, they are scrutinized not for the quality of their work but for the fact of their compensation. The question is never “is this analysis accurate?” It is “are they profiting from it?”
This is not a culture of accountability. It is a culture of self-destruction dressed up as principle.
While the left was policing whether its thinkers were sufficiently impoverished, the right was building an information empire.
This did not happen by accident. It was a deliberate, multi-decade, lavishly funded campaign to capture the media landscape, and it has succeeded beyond what its architects could have imagined. The timeline is worth laying out, because the pattern only becomes visible at scale.
Lewis Powell’s memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued that the American free enterprise system was under attack from academia, media, and the courts, and called for organized corporate investment in shaping public opinion. The memo became a blueprint for the institutional right.
The Heritage Foundation (1973), Cato Institute (1977), and dozens of smaller think tanks were established with corporate and philanthropic funding. They produced policy papers, trained spokespeople, and placed fellows in media. The left had nothing comparable in scale or coordination.
The FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, which had required broadcast stations to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. The removal created the regulatory space for ideologically partisan broadcasting.
Rush Limbaugh’s show launched nationally (1988). Fox News launched (1996). Conservative talk radio became the dominant format in AM broadcasting. The infrastructure was funded, professionalized, and scaled.
The Telecommunications Act deregulated media ownership, enabling massive consolidation. Within a decade, six corporations controlled 90% of American media. Local newspapers — the primary accountability infrastructure for municipal and state governance — began their terminal decline.
Hedge funds and private equity firms began acquiring newspaper chains — not to operate them but to extract value. Alden Global Capital’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group became the template: cut staff, sell real estate, harvest subscription revenue, let the journalism die.
The podcast and social media ecosystem became the primary site of political information consumption. Right-populist voices — Carlson, Rogan, Musk (who purchased Twitter/X in 2022) — dominated the landscape. The left’s presence in this space remained marginal, underfunded, and fragmented.
The Trump administration defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, effectively dismantling the last institutional infrastructure for non-commercial media in the United States. NSPM-7 designated domestic protest organizations as threats, creating chilling effects on speech and assembly. The Espionage Act was wielded against journalists and leakers. The information landscape was captured.
The right understood something the left refused to learn: information infrastructure is infrastructure. It requires capital, organization, professional capacity, and sustained investment. You do not build a media ecosystem on moral purity. You build it the same way you build a water system or a power grid — with money, engineering, and institutional commitment.
Finkelstein names the asymmetry plainly in his April 9 interview. The biggest influencers in American political media are Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, figures from the populist right. The left has no comparable presence. And the people who were right about the defining crisis of the moment — the Iran war — are overwhelmingly from the right-populist camp.
Tucker Carlson: media company, studio infrastructure, podcast network, direct political access (visited the White House before the Iran war to counsel against it).
Elon Musk: owns the platform itself (X/Twitter), controls algorithmic distribution, reach measured in hundreds of millions.
The Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, PragerU: professionally produced, institutionally funded, scaled for distribution across every platform.
Think tank pipeline: Heritage, AEI, Manhattan Institute, Hoover — producing policy papers, placing op-eds, training spokespeople, year after year.
Norman Finkelstein: Substack, speaking fees, apartment in Brooklyn. Ten books, PhD from Princeton, no institutional affiliation.
Independent journalists in conflict zones: GoFundMe campaigns, freelance rates that haven’t kept pace with inflation since the 1990s, no insurance.
Grassroots media: volunteer-run, donation-dependent, fragmented across platforms controlled by adversarial actors.
The academy: increasingly adjunctified, politically constrained, tenure under attack, public-facing work disincentivized.
The asymmetry is not a matter of talent or rigor. It is a matter of infrastructure. The right invested in building an information ecosystem. The left did not — and worse, the left actively punishes those within its ranks who attempt to build one.
An honest analysis has to confront a complication. The picture above is true — but it is incomplete. There is a category of left-coded media figures with massive audiences, multi-million-dollar contracts, decades of institutional support, and sustained cultural influence. They are the late-night comedians.
Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Comedy Central and continues to draw millions of viewers per episode. Stephen Colbert hosted The Late Show on CBS until the network’s recent capitulation pushed him out. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO has won every major television award and produces some of the most rigorously researched long-form political content on television. Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Maher — each commands a network platform, a writers’ room, a production budget, and a salary that places them comfortably in the top fraction of one percent of American earners.
Where do they fit in this analysis? Are they part of the left’s information infrastructure, or something else? Are their multi-million-dollar contracts acceptable, or is comedy somehow exempt from the scrutiny applied to Substack writers and podcast hosts? Do they get a pass because they operate within legacy media — and if so, what does that say about the left’s actual relationship to legacy media?
The honest answer is that the comedians occupy a category the left has never fully reckoned with. They are tolerated — and often celebrated — at compensation levels that would draw immediate accusations of selling out if applied to any non-comedic figure. Jon Stewart’s reported salary is in the tens of millions. John Oliver’s HBO contract is reportedly worth hundreds of millions over its term. Nobody on the left meaningfully objects to this. The same audiences that would attack a Substack writer for charging a $5 monthly subscription will defend a $30-million-per-year comedian without hesitation.
Why? Several reasons, none of them entirely flattering.
First, comedy provides cover. The defense — “it’s just jokes” — creates a permission structure that serious commentary doesn’t enjoy. When Stewart or Oliver makes a substantive political argument, the framing as comedy gives both the speaker and the audience plausible deniability. They aren’t claiming to be journalists. They aren’t asking to be taken as serious analysts. They are entertainers who occasionally tell the truth. This allows their audiences to consume political content without feeling implicated in the seriousness of the work — and it allows the comedians themselves to escape the credentialing scrutiny applied to people who make the same arguments without the punchlines.
Second, legacy media affiliation provides legitimacy. A million-dollar contract from CBS, HBO, or NBC is read as institutional validation rather than corruption. The same revenue, if it came from direct audience subscriptions on Substack or Patreon, would be read as commercialization. The medium launders the money. A comedian who earns thirty million from a corporate conglomerate is “successful.” An independent commentator who earns three hundred thousand from her own subscribers is “monetizing her platform.” The judgment is not about the amount. It is about the mediation.
Third — and this is the part the left rarely acknowledges — the comedians are mostly safe. They operate within the boundaries of acceptable liberal discourse. They mock Trump, defend institutions, lament polarization, and generally affirm the worldview of the educated, urban, professional-class audience that buys cable subscriptions and watches network television. They are not asked to take positions that would jeopardize their network deals. When they do — as Stewart did when he hosted Lewis Black to explicitly defend the Palestinian cause, or when Colbert pushed CBS too far on its Paramount-Trump settlement — they discover quickly where the boundaries are. Colbert’s show was canceled.
The comedians get a pass because they are entertaining, because they are corporate, and because they stay within the lines. The moment any of those conditions changes, the protection evaporates.
None of this is to dismiss the comedians’ work. Oliver’s investigative segments on bail bond reform, prosecutorial misconduct, and ICE detention conditions have moved policy in ways that traditional reporting often hasn’t. Stewart’s advocacy for 9/11 first responders and burn pit veterans produced concrete legislative results. These are not nothing. But they exist within an ecosystem that the left should be honest about: the comedians are permitted to do this work because they are profitable to corporate parents, because their audiences are demographically valuable to advertisers, and because their political range is bounded by what those parents will tolerate.
The contradiction is sharp. The left celebrates the comedians as political commentators while refusing to extend the same material support to the people producing the same work without the comedy framing — the people whose analysis is sharper, whose research is deeper, whose arguments don’t have to be softened for prime-time advertisers. The comedians get the salaries. The serious thinkers get the Substacks.
Consider three figures who do work directly comparable to what the late-night hosts do — but without the comedy, the network platform, or the seven-figure salary.
Heather Cox Richardson
Boston College history professor. Letters from an American on Substack reaches over a million daily readers — making it one of the most-read political newsletters in the country.
Treated by the institutional press as a curiosity, not a peer. Rarely booked on cable news. No book tour comparable to a Bob Woodward release despite being arguably the most-read American historian writing today.
Chris Hedges
Former New York Times bureau chief. Pulitzer Prize winner. Author of fourteen books. Hosts The Chris Hedges Report as an independent podcast after RT America was shuttered in 2022.
Effectively excluded from mainstream American media despite credentials that would make him an instant cable news fixture if his politics were different. Operates on Substack and YouTube.
Peter Beinart
Former editor of The New Republic. Professor at CUNY. Author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Hosts a podcast and writes a Substack newsletter on Jewish and Israeli politics.
Routinely smeared and marginalized despite being one of the most rigorous voices in American Jewish public life. His shift from liberal Zionism to honest critique cost him most of his institutional standing.
None of these three figures has anything close to the platform of John Oliver. None earns a fraction of what Bill Maher earns. None has a writers’ room, a production budget, or a corporate parent absorbing the costs of their work. Each produces analysis that is more substantive, more rigorous, and more politically consequential than most of what airs on late-night television. Each operates on Substack, on independent podcasting infrastructure, on the strength of direct audience support.
And each is treated, by the left and by the institutional media alike, as marginal. Heather Cox Richardson’s million daily readers don’t translate into the kind of cultural authority that Maher’s much smaller audience confers. Chris Hedges, despite his Pulitzer and his books and his decades of war reporting, is functionally exiled from American television. Peter Beinart, who broke from liberal Zionism in real time and produced one of the essential books of the post-October 7 period, is treated by the institutional Jewish press as a heretic and by much of the institutional left as suspect for his prior positions.
The pattern is consistent. Mediated, corporate, comedic delivery of left-coded politics is rewarded. Direct, rigorous, independent delivery of the same politics is marginalized. The marginalization is not a function of the work’s quality. It is a function of where the work sits in the institutional architecture — and that architecture rewards the comedians and punishes the analysts.
The left’s hostility toward its own creators — except, notably, the comedians — manifests in predictable ways. A podcaster who covers Palestine builds an audience and starts earning advertising revenue and is accused of “profiting off suffering.” A researcher who produces a documentary about police abolition negotiates a distribution deal and is criticized for “selling the movement.” An organizer who writes a book about their experience is scrutinized not for the book’s accuracy but for the advance they received.
This reflex has material consequences. It means that left-aligned creators face a choice that right-aligned creators never confront: grow your platform and lose your community’s trust, or remain small and retain your credibility. The right has no equivalent dilemma. Ben Shapiro’s audience does not punish him for being wealthy. Jordan Peterson’s followers do not question his commitment because he charges for his content. The financial success of right-wing media figures is treated by their audiences as evidence of merit — proof that the market validates their ideas.
On the left, the same financial success is treated as evidence of co-optation — unless it is laundered through corporate entertainment, in which case it is celebrated.
The result is predictable. The most talented independent creators, the ones capable of reaching mass audiences, either burn out from unsustainable working conditions, migrate to institutional positions that constrain their independence, or — increasingly — simply leave the left entirely. Why would you stay in an ecosystem that punishes you for succeeding?
Here is a simple proposition that should not be controversial but is: people who do work deserve to be paid for their work.
Humanitarian aid workers are paid. Nurses are paid. Teachers are paid (poorly, but paid). Public defenders are paid. The argument that compensation corrupts commitment was settled in every other professional field decades ago. Nobody argues that a firefighter’s dedication is compromised by their salary. Nobody suggests that an emergency room doctor should work for free to demonstrate their sincerity.
The left’s refusal to extend this basic logic to its own knowledge workers, media producers, researchers, and creators — except when they are mediated through corporate entertainment — is not principled anti-capitalism. It is a failure of strategic thinking that produces exactly the information vacuum Finkelstein describes — and that vacuum is then filled by people whose broader project includes the dismantlement of the commons, the welfare state, and the very solidarity frameworks the left claims to defend.
The right pays its thinkers. The right funds its media. The right builds institutions that outlast individual careers. And the right is winning the information war — not because its ideas are better, but because it understood that ideas require infrastructure to travel.
The self-inflicted wound of the martyr’s badge operates in concert with a deliberate external assault on left and independent media. The two dynamics — internal self-destruction and external suppression — are mutually reinforcing.
The defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting eliminates the last major institutional support for non-commercial media in the United States. NPR and PBS affiliates — already constrained by donor sensitivity and institutional caution — now face existential funding crises. The infrastructure that once provided at least a baseline of independent reporting is being dismantled.
NSPM-7 — the National Security Presidential Memorandum designating domestic protest organizations as threats — creates chilling effects that extend far beyond the organizations directly targeted. When the state designates anti-fascist organizing as a national security threat, every adjacent organization recalibrates. Journalists covering those movements self-censor. Funders withdraw. Platforms restrict. The chill radiates outward.
The Espionage Act’s deployment against journalists and sources — a pattern that predates the current administration but has intensified under it — transforms investigative reporting into a risk calculation most independent media cannot afford. When the penalty for publishing classified information is federal prosecution, and your organization has no legal department, no institutional shield, no endowment to absorb the cost — you don’t publish.
Newspaper consolidation completes the circuit. The hedge fund acquisition model — buy, strip, extract, discard — has hollowed out the local reporting infrastructure that once served as the primary accountability mechanism for municipal and state governance. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, and newspaper employment has declined by 70% in the last 15 years according to research from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. The communities they served are now “news deserts” — places where government operates without journalistic oversight, where corruption goes unreported, where the only available information comes from nationally distributed partisan media.
The landscape that results from these converging forces — internal self-destruction, external suppression, institutional dismantlement, and corporate consolidation — is exactly the landscape Finkelstein describes: one in which the left has no voice, the right fills the void, and the people who were correct about the most consequential events carry ideological baggage that will shape the political consciousness of a generation.
A reckoning is overdue. Not a reckoning in the sense of punishment — there has been enough of that, most of it self-inflicted — but in the sense of honest accounting. What has the left’s purity culture actually produced? Not purity. Not accountability. Not a functioning information ecosystem. It has produced silence at the moment when speech matters most.
And the legacy media is not coming back. The broadcast networks are owned by conglomerates that have already demonstrated they will fold under political pressure. The cable news channels are captured by ratings imperatives that reward outrage over rigor. The newspaper chains are owned by hedge funds whose business model is extraction. The colleges of journalism are graduating students into a job market that no longer exists. The legacy infrastructure that once supported professional journalism — the salaries, the editors, the legal departments, the time to actually report — is gone, and the political conditions that would allow it to be rebuilt within commercial media do not exist.
So where do journalists who still want to follow the ethics of journalism actually go? They abandon ship. They coalesce in newly formed nonprofit-centered media organizations. And the experiments are already underway. Several of them are working.
The Nonprofit Standard: Voice of San Diego
Voice of San Diego launched in 2005 as the first nonprofit news organization established to serve a local community. It is now twenty-one years old. It is sustained by nearly 4,000 donors plus foundation grants and sponsorships. Its mission — investigative journalism for a better San Diego — has remained intact across two decades while commercial newspapers in the region collapsed, consolidated, and were stripped for parts.
What makes Voice of San Diego significant is not just its longevity. It is that it became a template. Its founding inspired what is now more than 300 local nonprofit news outlets across the country. It demonstrated, before anyone else had proven it, that a community could fund its own journalism directly — without corporate parents, without hedge fund extraction, without advertiser dependency.
Founded 2005 · ~4,000 donors · Inspiration for 300+ local nonprofit news outlets
The University Lifeboat: NEWSWELL and ASU
NEWSWELL, a nonprofit incorporated in March 2024 and based at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, operates a model that did not exist five years ago. Local news sites donate themselves to NEWSWELL. NEWSWELL provides finance, IT, HR, legal services, audience expertise, and editorial support — the back-end infrastructure that small newsrooms cannot afford on their own. The newsrooms continue to operate independently, with editorial decisions made locally.
The Times of San Diego — Chris Jennewein’s ten-year-old independent news operation — became the first paper to donate itself to NEWSWELL in June 2024. Stocktonia and the Santa Barbara News-Press followed. The News-Press, a 150-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning paper that filed for bankruptcy in 2023, was rescued specifically to prevent its archive and brand from being acquired by an “AI-driven zombie site” — exactly the kind of extractive end-state that hedge fund acquisition produces.
NEWSWELL received a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation at its formal launch in January 2025. The Times of San Diego, since joining, has more than doubled its staff: three full-time, two part-time, thirteen freelancers, and four paid interns. Its story output more than tripled. Cronkite School journalism students intern at the partner papers, providing a talent pipeline that commercial newsrooms cannot match.
This is the model: a public university with institutional resources serves as a back-end host for a network of locally-operated, editorially-independent newsrooms. The university’s mission to serve communities aligns with the newsrooms’ mission to inform them. Neither is owned by the other. Both benefit from shared infrastructure that no individual newsroom could afford alone.
Incorporated March 2024 · 3 newsrooms · $5M Knight Foundation grant · ASU Cronkite School partnership
The Network: Institute for Nonprofit News
The Institute for Nonprofit News was founded in 2009 as the Investigative News Network at a gathering of two dozen nonprofit newsrooms at the Pocantico Center in New York. The result of that meeting — the Pocantico Declaration — committed the participating organizations to share resources and collaborate. INN now has 500 member organizations across North America. As of 2024, the median INN member generated $532,000 in annual revenue, up from $477,000 the year before. The 400 digital-first nonprofit newsrooms in INN’s network collectively earned an estimated $650-$700 million in 2024 — a 14% increase from 2023.
For the first time in 2024, local news outlets made up the majority of INN’s membership (51%, up from 48%). 83% of local nonprofit news organizations grew their revenue by at least 10% over the past three years. Four in ten member organizations participated in four or more editorial collaborations in 2024. Nearly 80% partnered on at least one. The network is real, it is growing, and it is producing original journalism at scale.
INN provides shared media liability insurance, business and technology training, fiscal sponsorship for nascent news operations, and the NewsMatch program that matches individual donations to member newsrooms. It is, functionally, the back-office infrastructure that the legacy newspaper chains used to provide — except built around mission rather than extraction.
Founded 2009 · 500 member organizations · $650-700M combined revenue · 80% participating in collaborations
The Statewide Reporting Cooperative: CalMatters
CalMatters is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization launched in 2015 to cover California state policy. Its work reaches eight million readers across the state through more than 270 media partners — newspapers, websites, radio, TV, apps, and educational materials. It does not compete with local newsrooms. It supplies them with statewide reporting they could not produce on their own.
The Prebys Foundation announced an $800,000 two-year grant to CalMatters in April 2025 specifically to fund its role as a shared reporting and data resource for regional media partners. The model treats statewide policy reporting as a commons — produced once, distributed widely, sustained by foundation funding and individual donors, and made available to local outlets that would otherwise have no capacity to cover state government at all.
Founded 2015 · 8M readers · 270+ media partners · $800K Prebys Foundation grant 2025
The Conversion: For-Profit to Nonprofit
The Salt Lake Tribune became the first legacy U.S. newspaper to convert to nonprofit status, in 2019. Other commercial papers have followed. The Seattle Times partnered with a foundation to raise money to fund more than two dozen reporters covering investigations and beats. The model is not yet at scale, but it is no longer experimental. For-profit newspapers can — under the right conditions — become nonprofit institutions while preserving editorial independence and institutional memory.
This matters because it offers a path forward for newspapers that haven’t yet been stripped to nothing. It is a way to opt out of the hedge fund extraction model before the extraction is complete. The window is narrow, but it exists.
Salt Lake Tribune (2019) · Seattle Times foundation partnership · Multiple papers exploring conversion
The Documenters Model: Community Co-Production
San Diego’s inewsource — a nonprofit investigative newsroom that has served the region for fifteen years — operates a Documenters program that trains and pays community members to attend public meetings and record what happens. This is journalism as commons. It treats civic information as something the community produces about itself, with professional editorial support, rather than something extracted by professional journalists for sale to advertisers.
The Documenters model originated at City Bureau in Chicago and has spread to nonprofit newsrooms across the country. It addresses the core problem of news deserts directly: there are not enough professional journalists to cover every public meeting in every community. So train and pay the community to do it. The journalism that results is not lesser. It is closer to its source.
inewsource · 15 years · Trained Documenters · Member of the Trust Project
The experiments above are not all the same. They differ in scale, in funding model, in institutional structure, in editorial focus. But they share several features that mark a coherent alternative to both the captured legacy model and the influencer-economy alternative.
First, they treat journalism as a public good rather than a commercial product. Their funding comes from foundations, individual donors, and institutional partners rather than from advertisers whose interests inevitably constrain coverage. They do not have to choose between accuracy and revenue. The funding model aligns with the mission rather than fighting it.
Second, they share infrastructure rather than duplicating it. NEWSWELL provides back-office services to multiple newsrooms. INN provides legal insurance, fundraising training, and technology resources to 500 organizations. CalMatters supplies statewide reporting to 270 media partners. The model is collaborative rather than competitive — which is exactly the opposite of the commercial newspaper model that pitted local papers against each other in zero-sum advertising markets.
Third, they pay people. The Times of San Diego under NEWSWELL has more than doubled its staff. INN member newsrooms employ 4,650 people, with about 70% in editorial or news-related roles. Voice of San Diego has paid professional journalists. inewsource pays its Documenters. The work is treated as work, and the workers are compensated as workers. The martyr’s badge has no place in this model.
Fourth, they are surviving the assault on legacy media because they were never structurally dependent on it. When CPB funding was cut, it damaged public broadcasters but did not destroy the nonprofit news ecosystem. When hedge funds bought up newspaper chains, the nonprofit newsrooms continued to operate. When the Trump administration targeted commercial media with lawsuits and regulatory pressure, the nonprofit sector — which had never depended on the goodwill of administration regulators — continued to publish.
The question is not whether the legacy model can be saved. It cannot. The question is whether the alternative being built underneath it can be scaled fast enough to fill the gap before the gap becomes permanent.
The nonprofit news ecosystem is real, growing, and demonstrably effective. It is also nowhere near sufficient to replace what is being lost. The legacy media’s collapse is happening faster than the nonprofit sector can grow. Some specific things have to change for the alternative to scale.
Foundation funding has to expand by at least an order of magnitude. The Knight Foundation’s $5 million grant to NEWSWELL is significant. It is also a fraction of what Heritage Foundation spends in a single year on policy production. The philanthropic infrastructure that supports nonprofit journalism is small relative to the infrastructure the right has built for ideological production. This has to change.
Tax policy has to support nonprofit news directly. Margaret Sullivan, writing for the Newmark Center at Columbia Journalism School, has called for national legislation to support journalism sustainability through subsidies to newsrooms via state universities — exactly the model NEWSWELL pioneered. The IRS has to stop targeting nonprofit news organizations as politically suspect. The current administration has called for an overhaul of the IRS investigative unit specifically to pursue donors and groups it considers “left leaning” — a direct threat to the funding model the nonprofit news sector depends on.
Universities have to commit institutional resources at scale. ASU’s Cronkite School demonstrates what is possible when a major public university decides that local journalism is part of its mission. Other universities — particularly the large public systems with established journalism programs — should follow. The capacity exists. The will has to be developed.
And the left has to stop policing its creators. The cancellation reflex, the suspicion of compensation, the conflation of suffering with credibility — these are not principles. They are the cultural infrastructure of self-defeat. The nonprofit news organizations that are working pay their staff. They build sustainable revenue models. They treat their readers as members and their donors as partners. They survive because they refused the martyr’s badge. The rest of the left would do well to learn from them.
Norman Finkelstein, at seventy-two, is still producing work of extraordinary precision and courage from an apartment in Brooklyn. His analysis of the collapse of international law, the return to the state of nature, the instrumentalization of the UN — this is work that matters, work that shapes how people understand the world they are living in. And it operates without institutional support, without infrastructure, without the material foundation that would allow it to reach the audiences it deserves.
That is not a badge of honor. It is a failure of the left to value its own.
The right built its machine over forty years. The legacy media that the left once relied on has been captured, defunded, or stripped for parts. But the alternative is being built — in nonprofit newsrooms, in university partnerships, in collaborative networks, in community co-production models. The infrastructure is real. It is working. It is small. It needs to grow much larger, much faster, and it needs the cultural permission to do so.
The reckoning the left needs is not punitive. It is recognitional. Recognize that the comedians are not the model. Recognize that the marginalized serious thinkers deserve the support that the comedians take for granted. Recognize that the nonprofit news experiments are pointing toward what comes next. Recognize that the absence of a machine is not proof of virtue.
And then build the machine.