"Does anyone on the C&L staff care about the N. Dakota protest or are Trump stories easier to write and draw more hits?"
Our reply:
We do indeed care about NoDAPL, and have a piece highlighting the horrendous violence done to their protesters Sunday night on the site. It was prominently featured on the front page, and I continued to feature it above other more recent content last night.
Yet, it received very little interest or attention. We feel it's important to highlight protester abuse and what are, in our opinions, acts of war upon American citizens. But we can't make people be interested in that.
We've also covered matters of substantive policy concerns. For example, I wrote a post on Saturday about Medicare, and how the GOP is coming for it.
Shelley P is in the midst of a series about what will really happen to federal agencies and regulations, post-transition. It's substantive, well-researched, and important.
John Amato put up two posts about waterboarding and torture this week -- topics that should be of concern to everyone, given that we can no longer rely upon Obama's executive order banning it, and neocons are already spinning it as "not torture." Crickets.
There have been myriad posts here about the TPP, future infrastructure plans and more.
We've written about the effort to reach faithless electors, and sounded the alarm about voting irregularities in swing states that should be investigated.
Many of our posts have Trump in the headline but really concern how media covers him, which is probably the most overriding story of our time.
Here's the thing: We cannot ignore the fact that Donald Trump will be the next president, nor can we simply turn away from him and pretend he doesn't exist. I totally understand the feeling that if you have to see that orange-faced, tiny-pawed shitgibbon on our site one more time you will scream. Trust me when I tell you we're all screaming inside too.
Here is the really depressing part: Most of the attention we get on our stories is directed toward stories about Trump. That's disheartening for us, too. We like writing about policy, but we have to keep the lights on here, so we need visitors and clicks, and we'd definitely like to get them without clickbait headlines and lots of Trump stories. But we will also be covering the Nazis in our midst, the white supremacists in the White House (Bannon) and more.
After all, it's pretty mind-boggling to imagine Van Jones being tossed out of his job in Obama's White House for a 9-11 petition they could never prove he signed, and now we're looking at an avowed conspiracy theorist and white supremacist about to assume one of the highest positions in government while having the ear of the next President at all times, right?
Here's how you can help. Reward the stories we do about NoDAPL, about policy, about media criticism. Share them. Help us keep our lights on, and we'll do our very best to do MORE of them.
Trump stories aren't easier to write. Most of us have to take deep breaths before writing them. But we also feel it's consistent with our mission to continue covering the Biggest Crook and Liar of them All -- President-Elect Trump.
Finally, our moderators said you had a question about whether we have any writers who are people of color. Right now, we do not. We would welcome any who are interested. I've reached out to some, but was met with little interest. We are still looking.
I know you probably weren't expecting a whole blog post on this inside a comment. But your question is an important one, and one I've meant to address for awhile. So it's your lucky day!
Karoli
