Isaac Saul, founder of the independent, nonpartisan newsletter Tangle, grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania— one of the best-known bellwether counties in the country. Realizing there wasn’t a common source from which both liberals and conservatives could get their news sparked the idea for Tangle.
“In thinking about all the things that were broken in our country and ways to fix it, it occurred to me that the media was really one of those things,” Saul told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club. Tangle, which Isaac started in 2020, is a one-stop-shop for news and analysis of arguments all across the ideological spectrum, with the intention of reducing media polarization.
“We’re not trying to get everybody to agree. This isn’t an ‘all hold hands in a circle and love each other’ goal,” said Saul. “The North Star is we want to be a news organization trusted by people on the left, right, and center equally. And the best way to do that is to represent really good arguments from across the political spectrum fairly to them.”
So far, Tangle has been a success, with hundreds of thousands of total subscribers, 40,000 paid subscribers and more than $2.5 million in annual revenue. Saul credits that success to an open-mindedness for the opinions of those they disagree with.
“I’ve had a lot of success actually changing the minds of my readers, many of whom are diehard [Donald] Trump supporters who came into Tangle thinking that the 2020 election was stolen, by having an open mind about what they’re actually arguing and by addressing the strong arguments they make that something was amiss rather than the ones that are really easy,” he said. “There are theories out there that I see where I’m like, I get why this is compelling. But if I do enough research, talk to enough experts, I can explain why it’s nonsense.”
Saul also speaks about the pros and cons of a rapidly decentralizing media industry, his coverage of U.S. politics’ thorniest issues— the war in Gaza and issues pertaining to the trans community— and how Tangle avoids giving in to misinformation.
Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
So first off, to give our audience a sense of who you are and where you come from, could you tell us about your career and how you got your start in journalism?
For sure. So I have a two-part genesis story I like to tell. The first is that I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is a bellwether county in a bellwether state. Obviously it got a lot of attention this year. It gets a lot of attention every election. So I just grew up around people who were politically eclectic. There were lots of different views in my family, my personal friend group, my social circles.
I came into the journalism world with that background and experience. I actually started as a sports reporter at The Pitt News, the University of Pittsburgh, and then after college, lived in Israel for a little bit, started applying for jobs in the news industry. And I ended up getting my start at The Huffington Post, which also is the second part of my genesis story, working at a mainstream news publication that had a very clear ideological tilt. And I got to see how the sausage was made there. Obviously, The Huffington Post leans left editorially. Some would consider it pretty far left. And that was informative for me just to see how that space worked, how it thrived, where it failed.
And I entered the media world realizing that a lot of people were getting their information from different places, and there wasn’t really a common spot that conservatives and liberals trusted together to get their news, which struck me as really problematic. And I think we saw the result of that starting in 2014, 2015, 2016, with just the way social media fractured and the news bubble and how people were living in different realities. And all of that was what I carried into the media world.
So Tangle, which you started, is a pretty fascinating concept. What was the idea at the outset and why did you decide to start Tangle?
Basically at the time I started Tangle, I was working for a media organization called A Plus, which was founded by Ashton Kutcher, and we were doing what was called solutions journalism. So focusing on the people who were fixing things rather than the people who were breaking things. I was leading the politics vertical there. And in thinking about solutions and all the things that were broken in our country and ways to fix it, it occurred to me that the media was really one of those things, and I wanted a news organization that I could go to and just get a wide range of opinions about a controversial topic all in one space.
So if I wanted to learn more about Trump’s border wall, instead of listening to a Ben Shapiro podcast, and then listening to The Daily, and then reading The New York Times, then reading The Wall Street Journal, and then watching Fox News and spending 12 hours researching different arguments across these different publications, I wanted it just in one place.
And I realized that didn’t exist. And I figured I probably wasn’t the only person who wanted that. So I tried to build something that sort of solved that problem. So our format is really the special sauce. We introduce a topic every day. We cover one controversial topic in U.S. politics and then we explain it in the most neutral language we can. And then we share views from the left about that topic. We share views from the right about that topic. And then I write a mini editorial every day where I share my own personal opinion and it connects with people. It seems like something a lot of people really want.
I do want to get into how you approach the editorial side of it. But first, it must have been fairly daunting to start a media outlet from scratch. How did you go about starting that and getting it off the ground?
So I started Tangle on Substack and I sent my first email to 13 people. So we literally built it from the ground up. We have close to 300,000 subscribers today, but it was a genuine leap of faith, I guess you could say. I was not confident at all that there was going to be a big market for this. Obviously, getting people to confront and wrestle with arguments that they disagree with politically is a really fraught exercise. It doesn’t feel like a lot of people are doing that in our country right now.
So, A, I was consistent. I just beat the drum. We had a daily newsletter Monday through Friday, and I publish a newsletter every day for now five and a half years. Doing that consistently, and consistently bringing some editorial rigor and some evenhandedness and nuance to these controversial topics over and over again, I think you just start to get noticed by people because not a ton of news outlets are doing that.
And B, I got it in front of people who had bigger audiences than I did. We’re citing writers’ and pundits’ and journalists’ work every day in the newsletter. And when we were doing that, I would let them know, hey, if you want to share this article on your Twitter account, spread the word about what we’re doing, subscribe to the newsletter, that’d be great. Slowly but surely, we built that effect up in the media world.
And then my readers who were just normal Americans from across the country started sharing Tangle because they recognized that other people in their social circles probably wanted something like this. We don’t publish a lot of crazy viral content. That’s not how we grow. We don’t do sensational headlines. We just provide a really quality product, in my opinion. And I think my take is something people connect with and want to argue about and engage with, and that gives them something to share or write in about, it gives us some of that shareability. But really I would say we did it by being slow and steady and consistent and just doing really good work day in and day out, which is the long game in this industry.
When did you start thinking, okay, this could be a real thing?
So I did what I think is the smart thing to do when you’re trying to start something like this, which is I kept a full-time job while I was launching Tangle, so I was working as an editor and a reporter. I was basically working on Tangle from 5 am until 9 am, at my lunch break, 6 pm to 10 pm every day, and then managing this full-time job in the middle. And I did that for about a year and we got the mailing list to maybe 2,000 – 2,500 people. And then we took the leap of faith of turning on the paid subscriptions, which for me was the gut check, whether people are willing to pay for this and I could really build an actual business around it.
The guys at Substack — by the way, I’m no longer on Substack, but I adore them. And they changed my life. Their platform changed my life. I made a business decision to leave. But I think it’s a great platform for journalism and for independent writers. They were like, you can expect 3 to 5% of your readers to convert. That’s a conservative, safe estimate to jump to the paid side. And when we flipped the switch, we got like 15, 18% of our readers to jump to the paid subscription. And they told me that this is one of the strongest signals we’ve seen from a newsletter like yours that people are willing to pay for it. You should be really proud of this, really happy about it.
And I was at that moment like, okay, I’m going to go all in on scaling this. If I can get one of every five or six people to give me money, I know what the number is on the mailing list that I need to get to in order to make a living off this. And so I kept at it for another few months and then eventually the subscription revenue exceeded what my current salary was at my job. And when that happened, I quit the job and went all in on Tangle. So I did it a little bit cautiously, but I took honest signals from our audience, which I think is the smart thing to do.
You can’t just bank on advertisers. You can’t just think that you’re going to get a bunch of people in the door and that means you can make a business out of it. I wanted to see people actually pay for it and prove to me that they thought what we were providing was valuable enough for them to subscribe before I took that leap of faith. And once I did and went all in, it’s just been slow growth throughout the last five years, with a few exceptions of some really big pops here and there. But for the most part, it’s just consistently trying to add 30, 40, 50 subscribers every day. And that’s how you get to where we are, basically.
How many paid subscribers are you at now and are you profitable?
So I’m really transparent about this, by the way, I talk about it a lot in the newsletter. It’s something I’m really proud of. I think more journalists, more people in the media industry should talk more about their successes, what they’ve done that works. So we’ve had tremendous growth, especially in the last month, month and a half. This American Life did a big feature on some of our work. Five million people a week listen to This American Life and NPR, between their podcasts and the live radio. So it brought in a ton of new readers. But we have over 40,000 paid subscribers now. And in membership revenue alone, we do more than $2.5 million a year in recurring revenue. So the business is very profitable.
I have a team of four full-time people. We’re hiring right now because of this influx of new subscribers that we’ve had. I’m trying to build the team out a bit and I want to keep those margins really healthy because I’ve been in the media world for a long time. So I know the rainy days come, it’s inevitable. Who knows? The newsletter industry could change, membership revenue could change, Stripe could do something different. There are so many different ways it could go. There’s a lot of risk on the table.
But generally speaking, we have a really, really healthy, really profitable business that’s lean and mean. And we’re making a lot of money and growing in a really sustainable way, which is super exciting. And that’s just the membership side of things. We also have advertising in the newsletter, advertising in the podcast. So there’s other revenue streams coming in, but like 90% of the money that we make in a given year is through subscriptions.
As someone who worked at HuffPost, you’re something of a digital media combat veteran. You understand how things were in the mid-2010s when people realized that the model didn’t really work anymore.
For what it’s worth, by the way, I experienced that basically everywhere I worked. At this company, A Plus, I worked for after Huffington Post, we ran one of the first influencer models. Ashton was our CEO. He brought in Ellen DeGeneres and Lil Wayne and all these big celebrities who would share our work on Facebook. And we entered the space with a bigger digital footprint than The New York Times or BBC. We were doing like 40, 50 million views a month. We were on top of the world. We thought we were invincible.
And then one day, we woke up and Facebook turned the dial and our whole business collapsed, the floor came out. So I do feel like a combat veteran in the media space in that sense. I’ve seen how quickly things can change and go south. And so I’m always looking over my shoulder and trying to protect the margin and protect our business because anything can happen. And I’ve experienced that.
We’re living through this massive decentralization of the news business. In most ways, I see that as a bad thing because it means that traditional media, which has high standards for truth and accuracy and guardrails, is losing influence. But it’s also great for Tangle, which is going to thrive as an independent operation as people look more toward those outlets. And Tangle is certainly one of the good guys out there delivering high-quality information. How do you see the new media ecosystem and are you optimistic about the future of the media business?
So I am optimistic about it in the sense that I think for a lot of people who want to get into media, a lot of people who aspire to be journalists want to pursue this field in a professional way. There are a lot of avenues to make a living and have a successful career, and those avenues are growing. I think the mid-2010s that we were talking about, even up until a few years ago, it was looking really dark. And I think the growth of independent media has been a good thing for just career prospects if you’re somebody who wants to do this work. That being said, I’m very candid about the fact that I can’t do what I do without The New York Times and Fox News and Wall Street Journal and ABC and all these different places out there that, A, do a lot of original reporting, and B, they pay the salaries of a lot of really prominent pundits and reporters whose work that we cite, whose work that we use, whose work that we criticize. All of those things play into our models.
So I view it more as a symbiotic relationship than a really competitive one, at least from where we’re sitting in the space. I want those places to succeed. I want media organizations to do well and to profit. I also think that the mainstream “corporate media” has a lot of blind spots and is doing a lot of things that are becoming archaic. They are definitely ideologically captured by the left. I don’t think we could get any more evidence for that than we have already. Something like 7% of all journalists at these mainstream media organizations are registered Republicans. There is a clear ideological tilt to what you see in a lot of the traditional corporate media.
So I think we can fix that and address that with pressures from the independent media. I see places like The New York Times responding to it, not just because I see New York Times reporters who read Tangle and are subscribed to our newsletter, but also just how they’re staffing up, how they’re approaching controversial topics publicly. I think they recognize that they’re not reaching 40, 50% of the country or they don’t have their trust and they want to address that somehow. And that pressure exists because of the independent media ecosystem. So I think that’s good. The more people watching the watchers, the better. And I’m supportive of that, though I certainly agree that there are a lot of really crappy independent media organizations out there who are publishing really unreliable information because they don’t do what traditional media organizations do. They don’t have good editorial standards. They don’t fact-check stuff before they publish. All that exists. And it’s hard to deny that that’s a problem too.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple had a great story out this week about how Fox News, and I think this applies to certain independent media outlets as well, relies heavily, almost exclusively, on traditional media reporting for their commentary and analysis, but then turn around and say, “you can’t trust the traditional media.”
It’s one of the great contradictions. The example that I like to give people a lot that I use when I’m arguing with people who are traditional media critics is something like the Hillary Clinton email story, that basically ended her political career and defined 2015 through 2018 politics, was a story that The New York Times reported, and published, and broke.
And somehow we’ve totally forgotten and suppressed that, that the organization that gets the most criticism from the right of maybe any organization published arguably the most damaging story about a Democratic politician that we’ve seen in the last 15 or 20 years. And they did it because they were well-sourced and staffed up and their journalism is funded.
And when that story came out, nobody was questioning the validity of it. Everybody on the right trusted it and cited it and used it to beat Hillary over the head with, rightfully so. But that’s just a great example of how we pick and choose which stories from the mainstream press we want to buy into or not.
Tangle markets itself as unbiased, and I think that you cover the news in an unbiased way that still remains compelling because what we typically assume when we hear unbiased is boring. But as I’m sure you know, it’s almost impossible to do news that everyone can agree is unbiased. For example, stating the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election is enough to get you tarred as liberal propaganda these days. How do you approach that?
It’s a great question. So first of all, I like to more accurately describe what we’re doing as nonpartisan in the most traditional definition, which is we don’t have any affiliation or have particular favor towards any political group. We treat everybody as evenly and fairly as we can. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have opinions, that I don’t have opinions. I share my opinions in the newsletter every day. I just label what’s my opinion very clearly and carve out some space to do that, which is, from my perspective, an act of transparency. You should know what my worldview is if I’m the person who’s giving you the information that you’re getting, and you can use that to contextualize the rest of the newsletter and the parts of the newsletter that are supposed to be more neutral or opinions from the left or the right. And our readers really appreciate that.
So in terms of how we address those kinds of questions that maybe get you tarred and feathered by one particular political tribe or the other, I would say we give space in the newsletter for the countervailing argument always, and that’s just how we address it. So if we’re covering whether the 2020 election was stolen or not, I have a section that is what the right is saying in the newsletter where I’ll go find the best argument that I can from conservatives that something was amiss with the 2020 election, and I’ll share that with my readers and they can judge it, take it, leave it, whatever.
But I’m going to use the “My Take” section personally because I believe the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. I’ve actually done a ton of work on this. I will use the “My Take” section to explain why I think those conservative arguments are bunk and then people can see my argument next to theirs and they can decide what they find more compelling.
And I’ve had a lot of success actually changing the minds of my readers, many of whom are diehard Trump supporters who came into Tangle thinking that the 2020 election was stolen. I’ve had success changing their minds by having an open mind about what they’re actually arguing and by addressing, in my opinion, the strong arguments they make that something was amiss rather than the ones that are really easy, like silly videos on Twitter or whatever purporting to show somebody stuffing ballots in a mailbox or something like that. There are theories out there that I see where I’m like, I get why this is compelling. Some statistician who works at a university in Michigan saying that the numbers behind the ballot dumps in Michigan were statistically impossible. And it sounds really convincing, and I understand why it’s convincing.
But if I do enough research, talk to enough experts, I can explain why it’s nonsense. And so that’s just how I approach it. And if people are willing to have a little bit of an open mind about it, I think I can get them closer to reality. And if they’re not, then we’ll fight a different battle on a different day, basically. And I’m not going to change everybody’s mind.
It sounds like your approach, which is different from the way the rest of the media does it, which is when they encounter stolen election claims for example, which are really ludicrous, they treat them pretty much with contempt. The claims are facially absurd. There’s never been any evidence for them. So what most of the media does is they look at those claims and they say, pretty contemptuously, there’s no evidence for this stuff. We’re not even debating it. What you’re doing is you’re seeking out the most convincing arguments in favor of those claims, presenting them for the reader, and then in your take, you’re saying, okay, those still don’t amount to a stolen election. And by the sounds of it, that works?
Yeah. And I would say the most important thing is that I frame my motivations for investigating those claims as clearly as possible. For instance, I wrote a very lengthy piece about the film 2000 Mules by Dinesh D’Souza, which convinced a lot of people that there was this organization of Democratic ballot stuffers that swung all the swing states towards Joe Biden in 2020.
Isaac, did you have to watch 2000 Mules?
I did. I paid for and watched 2000 Mules. I took notes and actually recently just invited Dinesh D’Souza onto my podcast, which he accepted pending his legal cases ending, so we’ll see how that turns out. But the way that I approached it is I said I am a journalist. I’m somebody who’s very skeptical of government. I believe everybody gets one conspiracy theory they can have fun with or subscribe to. Mine personally is that the government has evidence of aliens visiting the United States. I love that conspiracy theory. I love going in on it.
So I’m open-minded about stuff like this, that might seem a little outlandish on the surface. And also, as a reporter, if I could prove that Democrats stole the 2020 election, it’s Pulitzer Prize-winning material.
It would be an incredible story.
It’s the most incredible story of corruption, of undercover secrecy that ever existed probably in American history. It would be monumental. So I, more than anything else in the world, would love to be able to tell you that I’ve unlocked the code and I can prove to you that this election was stolen. And that’s where I’m approaching this story from. And that’s what I tell my readers.
And then I go through what 2000 Mules is alleging and what happens when I put those allegations up against my strongest scrutiny and skepticism and they fall apart. And I think when I frame the story that way, rather than, you’re an idiot if you believe 2000 Mules, people are a lot more willing to hear me, especially if they come into the article thinking that 2000 Mules is portraying reality and they change their mind. And that’s a genuine thing.
I’m not doing that just to convince people. I’m doing that because it is genuinely how I feel and I am trying to approach it with an open mind and I am going to bring some skepticism to it. And this is what I found. So I’m going to communicate to you as effectively as possible. And I found that to be a really effective approach with people who are on the other side of an issue like the stolen election.
The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw your format was that you were going to take heat for sometimes bringing false balance to a story. Which I think is a mostly tedious argument, but sometimes it does have an application. If you’re dealing with something that is a loony conspiracy theory and you’re saying, here’s what the left is arguing, and here’s what the right is arguing, you could make a criticism that that’s putting both of those sides, no matter who is presenting the conspiracy theory, on the same plane. Is that a criticism you face?
Yeah, it’s a criticism we face every day, every week. And I think it’s a fair criticism. I think there’s a value there, that people are expressing when they get frustrated about that, that I’m receptive to and totally understand. My response to it is basically twofold. The first thing is we’re occupying a very specific space in the media world. If you want a news organization that’s just going to tell you what the truth is in an opinion format, you can go read The New York Times editorial board and they’ll do that for you. It exists everywhere, all across digital media and the print media and the podcasts and the television media space. Everybody is doing that. We are not doing that.
I’m not here to tell you what the truth is. I have my take, which is my way of telling you what my truth is. But I’m not telling you what to think. I’m hopefully teaching you how to think and giving you tools and information to come to conclusions that are more evidence-based. But I’m not trying to tell you the truth.
And the second thing is we do take care not to just give equal bandwidth to things that we find outlandish or lacking evidence as a team, as an editorial group versus things that maybe follow a more logical consistency, that are more evidence-based, that have more facts behind them. So something like climate change is a really controversial issue. This is one of the classic examples where I think there are definitely Republicans out there who believe that the climate is not changing because of any actions humans are taking. I also think the science is overwhelming that they’re wrong, but those Republicans aren’t every Republican. I don’t even think they’re the majority anymore.
The real disagreement that exists in our country is what should we do about it and how much are we willing to sacrifice to address it. And so we might share one argument out of six in the newsletter that’s making the case that humans’ impact on the climate is overstated. But the other arguments from the right are going to accept the fact that humans are changing the environment, but argue about what we should do about it because that’s representative of where the country is as a whole. And I think when you take that all together, there are often more rational, evidence-based arguments to be had than there are outlandish conspiracies. So it works itself out when we just try and create a representative sample in the newsletter.
So part of the newsletter’s reason for existence is tackling really thorny issues. What have you found is the most difficult issue you’ve tackled so far?
I would say in the last few years the two have been the war in Gaza and trans issues. I think they’re the biggest third rails, the ones that drive the most reader feedback, the most people canceling or unsubscribing in ways that I view as being way too sensitive. That to me is probably pretty aligned with where the country is as a whole. Issues like economics and immigration and abortion, they matter a lot to people. But I think they’ve been around for so long that they have a little bit less of an edge to them and they’re a little bit less explosive.
But yeah, the Israel story and October 7th and everything that came after that, especially as I’m a Jew. I’ve lived in Israel. My opinion, I think carried a little bit more weight, came with more baggage, mattered more to our readers who were on both sides of the issue, and drew a lot of contempt, a lot of support too, but a lot of contempt.
And then trans issues. I think there’s a really big social shift happening where a lot of people who grew up on really traditional views of gender and sex are being asked to have more flexible, open-minded views about it. And that’s really difficult. And I sympathize with them and I align with them on a lot of those issues, actually. But regardless of what you write, you’re going to piss a lot of people off, whether it’s the progressive left or more traditional conservatives.
I first started reading Tangle in the aftermath of the October 7th attack, and I thought that you were writing about the conflict with far more nuance and clarity than much of the American media. And it’s obviously an incredibly thorny topic. Was there a conscious decision on your part to tackle this because of how complex it was, or was it just the news of the day? And do you ever feel concerned about tackling something that you know is going to alienate readers?
Yeah, I worry about it. But I have a general approach to the work, which is I’ve made a promise to the readers that I’m going to be honest about my personal views. That’s what the “My Take” section is about. It’s not about me compelling them to believe a certain thing. It’s really, truly supposed to be an act of transparency. This is how I feel. This is how I got there. I don’t necessarily believe that I’m 100% right all the time. My views are not set in stone. They change. They’ve changed a lot in the last five years. And I’m open to criticism. I’m open to feedback. That’s what this is about. But I’m just going to be honest about how I feel.
So I think, I hope that safeguards me a little bit with my readers, where they give me some grace to be wrong. They give me some grace to disagree with them, and it allows there to be some space for that friction. In terms of picking the topic, yeah, we try and cover things that are divisive because we’re operating from a viewpoint that Americans don’t understand each other very well and they’re not being exposed to ideas that contradict their priors often enough. So on an issue like Israel, it’s the news of the day. It’s really controversial. It’s a no-brainer that we’re going to cover it. And our hope is that by covering it, Americans of all political stripes get exposed to some ideas and some views that they might not encounter otherwise. And really, we’re not trying to get everybody to agree. This isn’t an all hold hands in a circle and all love each other goal. That’s not the North Star.
The North Star is we want to be a news organization trusted by people on the left, right, and center equally, regardless of their political affiliation. And the best way to do that is to represent really good arguments from across the political spectrum fairly to them. And when we do that, they get exposed to a wide range of views and they learn more and they challenge their own views. And I think it’s just healthy for the human brain to do that right now.
Yeah. And on the conflict itself, have your views on it changed in the last year since October 7th, covering this so intensely?
Man, it’s a really good question. I would say yes, in all sorts of different ways and in ways that are contradictory and inconsistent. I’ve heard, ironically, one of my favorite Israeli commentators, Haviv Rettig Gur, who’s a really smart guy and is very staunchly pro-Israel, but I think has some of the strongest arguments for this conflict and the things that are happening, he describes himself as a deeply complicated person. He is not himself complicated, but he is literally confused about what’s happening. He says, I’m a deeply confused person about these issues and it makes me deeply complicated, makes my views deeply complicated. And that resonates with me a lot. I’m a deeply confused person on the issue.
So in some ways, I think I feel more strongly than ever right now that the state of Israel needs to exist for Jews as a safe haven. And at the same time, I also feel more strongly than ever right now that the current iteration of the Israeli government is basically corrupt to the core and needs to be remade. And those are two views that I didn’t necessarily have a year and a half ago. But it’s where I’ve landed and they’re in tension with each other. But it’s just my honest feeling about how the conflict has unfolded and what we’ve seen, really.
Now, you had a TED Talk over the summer that I think is really worth a watch. You talk about the language choices that we use in media and elsewhere and how they are used to drive partisanship. And words obviously mean different things to different people, which can land you in a lot of hot water with readers. Tell us what your argument about language is there and how you look at the use of language when you’re writing Tangle.
So one of the big things that’s important to understand context-wise here is that we introduce these topics in our newsletter and our podcast in the most neutral language we possibly can at the beginning of the newsletter. So before we get into whatever the right is saying, whatever the left is saying, whatever my take is, we’re just trying to explain the story of the day in a really balanced way. And that’s often the hardest part of the newsletter to write because it requires this really even tone that’s also interesting and informative.
And what I was seeing was that we were making language choices in that section of the newsletter and the podcast that was alienating our readers and listeners. We would refer to illegal immigrants as illegal aliens or undocumented immigrants, and people would write in saying they’re unsubscribing because no person is illegal or because we were softening the issue by calling them undocumented immigrants. And I had the realization that we really needed to think a lot harder about those language choices so people could actually just get to the arguments themselves and expose themselves to that back two-thirds of the newsletter, which they weren’t doing.
And when we went to revisit our editorial choices, we realized that there was a lot of room for improvement, that the AP style and Chicago style that a lot of newsrooms rely on, I don’t think are thoughtful enough about where half the country is coming from on these really controversial issues like immigration or abortion or trans issues.
And so we just did a full tear-down and rebuild of our language choices and tried to look really critically at what they were and how they could be as big-tent and evenhanded as possible. And we made some changes. The classic immigration example is that we refer to people who have come to the country illegally as unauthorized migrants, which is a legal term that doesn’t obscure the fact of what they did, that they’ve broken the law, but also doesn’t diminish their humanity by referring to them as illegal aliens.
And since we’ve made that change, I can say, remarkably, that I’ve literally not gotten a single complaint about that language choice from somebody on the right or the left. And it’s totally just disarmed this previously really hot-button issue that we had to navigate when producing the newsletter and the podcast. And it just allows people to be more open-minded about it.
Another example, a hot-button one that I wanted to get your take on is the word “terrorist,” which has been a pretty heated debate over the last year. Do you have a policy on when you apply the word terrorist to certain people or groups?
That’s a really hard one and it’s something we’ve talked about a lot internally, and we’ve been struggling to get a clean, easy definition that we can apply in a way that feels appropriate and true. I would say, generally speaking, terrorism is acts of violence that have a political motivation behind them. The interesting thing about that is that you can define a lot of things in that bucket. Is a government action terrorism if it’s a military action that’s approved by Congress? Because there’s a political motivation behind it, it’s an act of violence, you’re bombing a country. Maybe. But then are we calling the US government or the Russian military, or whatever it is, terrorists when we want to reserve that word for specific egregious acts of political violence that are often from extremist groups? I don’t know.
So we’ve, in the past and up until now, have used more traditional language and made more traditional editorial choices about who and how we apply the term terrorism. And in the future, I don’t want to just do it for religious extremists who are in the Middle East, typically Muslim religious extremists. I don’t think that’s a fair application of the term. So we have to find a way to open it up more. I would say I feel much less comfortable applying the term to government organizations that are making actual legal, democratic choices to inflict violence on certain countries in the name of national security. It’s harder for me to apply that term, even though I think some people want us to. So, yeah, it’s one of the really tricky ones. And frankly, we haven’t been able to find a really nice, clean way to navigate that yet.
There’s a great scene in the new TV show Say Nothing, which is about the troubles in Ireland. And there’s a little British girl, and she corrects a soldier for calling the conflict a war. And she says it’s not a war, it’s an insurgency. Calling it a war gives the terrorists legitimacy. Which I think is a perfect example of how language like that can be weaponized for partisan gain. And as you note, in the United States, terrorist would be used to describe Hamas and the October 7th attack, which I think a lot of people can agree upon. It’s never used to describe Israel. And some people would argue there’s a double standard there because Israel has killed far more civilians in the last year than Hamas. So do you think that there is a double standard there in how the media uses that term? Or do you think that the media is doing its best to describe a very tricky situation?
I think both. I think the media is doing its best to describe a very tricky situation. And I also think there is a double standard there that exists, at least in terms of the way in which a word like terrorist qualifies violence. When you hear something like a terrorist attack, especially through the Western lens and the Western media lens and the Western consumer lens, you immediately think of something that is worse or somehow more immoral than a military attack or a military strike. And I do think that that’s problematic when both things might end in a bunch of kids under the age of ten dying. There is a real Western lens there to how we talk about these issues of war and violence.
Of course, I’m communicating with a predominantly Western audience. So I want to operate in language and the confines of frameworks that they understand and can relate to. But yeah, I think it is problematic. And I again, I do think media organizations are generally grasping with this and they’re trying to address it. But it’s a really, really hard and tricky situation.
And I think one of the biggest issues is that we cover something like the story in Israel through a Western lens when I actually don’t think that’s the appropriate lens to talk about the issue through or cover it through. Israel is not a Western country, to be totally frank. It is much more a Middle Eastern country than it is a Western one, even though a lot of Americans project our own Westernism onto it because it’s “the only democracy in the Middle East.” So there’s so much complication and nuance there. But yes, I do think there’s a double standard there to how we talk about violence and killing, especially in times of war, that we don’t have a great way of reconciling right now.
When you look at the rest of the media ecosystem, who’s doing it well, who do you draw inspiration from, and who’s doing it badly?
Man. First of all, I would say organizations like The Wall Street Journal to me are producing the most on the news side, their editorial team obviously has a really conservative slant, which is fine. But on the news side specifically at The Wall Street Journal, I think they’re producing some of the most evenhanded, balanced and fair journalism of any media outlet that’s out there. I opened The Wall Street Journal first every morning. I think they cover politics really well. I think the way they frame stories, the way they cite a variety of viewpoints in their stories and address certain blind spots about issues, and present minority opinions that exist out there is really, really good.
And I think they’re doing it better, frankly, than The New York Times and The Washington Post are right now, despite the fact that those three are all competitors in this elite media print space. I feel a little uncomfortable talking about media organizations that are doing it badly. I would maybe use an example like The Free Press. I personally love The Free Press, I read their content every day. And they have a very similar goal to what we do, to be this independent, punching-above-their-weight news organization that’s creating interesting, important conversations.
But I think that they are quickly falling into the audience capture that has been the demise of news organizations like Fox News or The New York Times because I’m watching them in real-time start to just produce a lot of the same content that I know their readers really want and really love things, that are critical of trans treatment for minors or stories that are all about conservatives working at liberal media organizations and breaking free from that, and what it’s like to be that person on the inside. There are these certain themes that they keep repeating where I feel like they’re losing some of the ideological diversity they had in the beginning.
So I don’t want to say they’re doing it badly because I aspire to a lot of what they’re doing, and especially as an independent media organization, I look up to the business that Bari [Weiss] has built, but as a consumer, I’m worried that they are one of these independent media organizations where being heterodox is almost the ideology in itself, and they just do that on repeat. And I think they’re falling into that audience capture in a way that I’m hoping we don’t, and that I think fewer media organizations should be because we don’t do enough of telling readers and listeners what they don’t want to hear. And I think the Free Press could do more of that right now. I say that as a fan.
You guys have sort of similar missions, but the Free Press has ended up having an incredibly narrow set of ideological thought on its pages. And I suspect that has something to do with a subscription model that relies on appealing to your audience. You have always resisted that, and I look forward to continue reading. Isaac Saul, thanks so much for coming on Press Club. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
