Re-Introducing Finding Gravity

This is Finding Gravity, a newsletter I’ve been writing intermittently for a few years.

Finding Gravity is about all the usual things – government, politics, media criticism. Quite a lot of media criticism.

The name of this newsletter — Finding Gravity — was inspired in part by the Drive-by Truckers song Gravity’s Gone, in which Mike Cooley sings “I've been falling so long, it's like gravity's gone / And I'm just floating.” That line pops into my head frequently as I think about how disorienting our current era can be. We’re in such a free-fall (and in so many different ways) that it can be hard to keep track of where we are, which way is up, which way is down — and the difference between falling and floating. One of my primary professional obsessions over the past few decades has been fighting the ways America's institutions - particularly media, government, corporations, and political parties - keep us disoriented.

That's what Finding Gravity is about. Separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, the important from the trivial. Up from down; falling from floating.^[1]

I've never really introduced myself in this space. I have worked in and around politics and media for 30 years. I worked in opposition research at the Democratic National Committee for the 1996, 1998, and 2000 cycles, served as research director for the DCCC for the 2002 cycle, then co-created Media Matters for America, which I helped lead through the organization's first five years.^[2] I have led opinion research for a $100 million SuperPAC, and consulted for progressive organizations large and small, helping out good causes with strategy, communications, opinion research, and more. A longterm client of which I am particularly proud is Take Back the Court, which was pushing to expand and rebalance the Supreme Court since before it was cool.

I was pretty good at Twitter, for better or worse. That's probably how some of you found your way to this newsletter. I'm not there anymore, but you can find me on Bluesky.

For the last two decades, whatever else I've been doing, the primary thing I've thought of myself as doing is sounding an alarm. About the deeply autocratic and rabidly anti-democratic nature of the American conservative movement, about corporate news companies that actively mislead and misinform the American people, about the biases of social media companies in favor of the the far right, in favor of lies and conflict and confusion. About the ways our institutions are making us dumber and weaker and aiding the rise of fascism in America through both malice and incompetence. I am a critic by nature and by experience, and I have seen the dangers of many of these things long before most of my peers. So I have sounded an alarm, hoping folks who are by nature creators and builders can find solutions I cannot see to the problems I cannot help seeing.

That's a lot of what I'll continue doing in this space.

For nearly as long as I've been writing this newsletter, I have wanted to move it to a new platform. That kept me from writing as much as I wanted to, because every time I started to write a post I immediately started thinking I should first do the backend work of moving it to a platform I was more happy with. Usually I did neither.

You can probably guess where this is going: I've finally switched platforms. If I've done everything right, you shouldn't notice much of a change (except, hopefully, an increase in the frequency with which I write.) Your email subscriptions should be the same. Paid subscriptions are still processed the same way. Free subscribers still have access to all posts; commenting privileges are still reserved for paid subscribers.

If anything doesn't work correctly^[3] or you have any questions about your subscription, please don't hesitate to reach out to me via email, or post a comment below.

Most importantly: Thank you. If you’re reading this via email, it’s because at some point you subscribed to Finding Gravity. Thank you for that. An extra thanks to those of you who are paid subscribers. I don't think I’ve ever asked people to pay for a subscription to this newsletter, and I know I never offered anything in return for a paid subscription^[4] – all posts have always been free to all subscribers. That means that if you chose to pay for a subscription, you did so pretty much entirely on your own, with no incentive other than wanting to pay for my work. That’s an honor. Thank you.

If you're new here: Welcome. I hope you'll subscribe. Here are a few pieces from the archives to give you a sense of what this newsletter is about:

• Go ahead, pick the "wrong" fight: Inspired by a bad argument that we should just go along with calling the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," this February 2025 piece sums up my current thinking about how we get out of this mess: "We aren’t in a situation in which we can pick only the 'right' fights; only fights we can clearly win. Things are so much worse than that, and will be for a very long time. The cold hard truth is there aren’t very many fights we can have a high degree of confidence we can win; there’s too much stacked against us. We have to be willing to pick some fights we will probably lose, because those are pretty much the only kinds of fights we have. That doesn’t mean we must pick every fight, but it does mean we should think twice, or maybe three times, before we lecture others about what fights not to pick. ... It’s time to let a hundred flowers bloom."

• How the news media privileges dangerous and hateful Trump-Vance lies. In 2008, when I was executive vice president at Media Matters for America, I began using the phrase "privileging the lie" to describe the advantage news companies often give lying politicians, particularly those on the right. This September 2024 piece about the Trump-Vance campaign's shameful lies about Haitian immigrants lays out my case against privileging the lie.

• The New York Times Protests Too Much: A lot of you are probably mad at the New York Times these days. So am I -- only in my case "these days" means "for the last thirty years." This May 2024 piece articulates some of the reasons, along with some big picture thoughts about what journalists get wrong about journalism, and what they should do: "The news media should tell its audience true things, in proportion to their importance, with no concern for how anyone feels about it."