A Donation Supporting the Best Candidate Comes with This Merch
You’re not donating directly to the candidate, yet you support them
Today I want to talk about a financial transaction you can make to support the best political candidate.
No, I don’t know who the best political candidate is. I may not even have an opinion on whom you should support, as I don’t know where you live nor when you’re reading this. Nor am I sure that any human being can know, with certainty, who the best candidate is.
But if there’s any supporting information to be found on who the best candidate may be, we can confidently expect that it will be reported by a newspaper.
More specifically, some of that information will probably have been reported by a local newspaper early in that politician’s career. When alarming facts are revealed in someone’s early career, they often don’t go on to have a late career. In this manner, the quality of candidates tends to improve.
There’s a Difference Between Informed and Uninformed Opinions
I’m not defining precisely what I mean “best candidate” except to say that this designation wouldn’t be based on someone’s arbitrary preference (mine or anyone else’s) but on some shareable body of relevant facts.
In a general sense, the best candidate would be someone who has a positive track record and demonstrates relevant talents and skills. I’m not predefining what those actions, talents and skills may be (as they’re likely situation-dependent), but I’m assuming that, in a given situation, there is relevant information to be found. There’s at least one fact-based way to make an informed opinion about who the best candidate is. There’s a difference between informed and uninformed opinions on this type of question.
How We Become Informed
When you support serious investigative reporting, especially at the local level, you support the discovery of relevant facts, the organization of those facts into information, and the distribution of those stories. The result is that the public in general is more informed about everything. This also equips the public to decide which information may be relevant to determining who the best candidate is.
Your neighbors become smarter. You become smarter by living in that neighborhood.
When we have good methods of thinking and judging, we are better equipped to identify the best candidate for a political position.
It’s possible that there are no absolutely correct methods of thinking and judging. Some of us are relativists on this point. Even so, we can agree that some methods make a lot more sense than others.
Even before you form your own opinion on who the best candidate is — and even if you personally never form one, which might happen, for example, due to lack of time or interest right now — you nonetheless support the best candidate when you support fact-based investigations and good-faith narratives. You have supported other people figuring out who the best candidate is because you have supported their access to good-quality information.
By analogy: When you support science, you support the pursuit of facts, even though neither you nor the scientists know yet what those facts are (the science is still being done and is forever ongoing).
Journalism is another way that people pursue facts. Supporting investigative journalism means believing that the truth matters, caring about good options over worse options, and airing the facts. By extension, journalism ultimately does support the best option. Truth-tellers don’t have to explicitly endorse a candidate; their support comes in another form. Truth-telling inherently does support the best candidate, because when all the facts are on the table, everyone knows who’s best.
You Can Do This One Thing
You’ve probably received phone calls asking for donations to political organizations. You may donate to those organizations if you like.
Here, I’m suggesting an additional thing you can do.
You can buy a newspaper subscription. Yes, it’s the purchase of a good or service, but you can also think of it as a donation if you want. You’re donating to the pursuit of truth.
Why? Because Journalism Is Work, and It’s Risky
Journalism is work, and some people do it full-time. Reporters travel to hear what people say and do in meetings and gatherings, they pore through massive data sets and court rulings and historical archives, they ask tough questions until they get a response, and they write coherent stories that are fact-checked and edited. This requires money. There are expenses directly related to the work; moreover, because the journalist spends their whole life doing this, they need a salary to live on.
Journalists also face threats.
Worldwide, the Committee to Protect Journalists exposes those threats. You can donate to that organization.
Furthermore, just in the United States, there have been over 1,800 recorded incidents from January 1, 2017 through today in which someone performing journalism was hindered in a way that violates freedom of the press, such as by being assaulted or having their device seized. I hope you heard of the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland five years ago. You may have heard that police raided the Marion County Record in Kansas four months ago. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker counts incidents like these, and you can donate to it.
So Try It, and Accept the Merch
Your simplest act right now may just be to subscribe to your local newspaper. Or to the newspaper in any city or county you care about, even if it’s far away. You can buy the news in any language. Receive it digitally, on paper, or by audio. That’s up to you.
In our connected world, supporting meaningful journalism anywhere ends up supporting journalism everywhere.
Imagine what your life would be like if no one had access to certain information you commonly rely on, like what your elected representatives are really doing compared with what they claim they’re doing. Now, that’s your reason to subscribe. If no one funds the newsroom, the newsroom won’t exist. No one will know what’s real, and dialogue erodes.
If you support a newsroom doing serious reporting, you’re supporting the truth. You’re making a donation supporting the best political candidate as well as the best metrics by which to make that judgment.
No, we don’t yet know which candidate is best nor even what the standard is. You’re supporting the best person and the best way for you to assess that person, whoever and whatever they truly be. We can’t predict exactly what information we’ll receive nor what we’ll be able to do with it. We have to support the news first before we can decide what the news means.
You’ll have a new morning routine: reading the news. Because your donation comes with merch.
