Welcome to My Substack!

What you can expect from me in this space

Welcome to my Substack!

I’m Batya Ungar-Sargon, a journalist, news anchor, and author. I have a weekend show on NewsNation. I’ve made frequent appearances on Realtime With Bill Maher, Fox News, and CNN, and now am a contributor to NewsNation. I’ve written three books: Bad News explores why the media went woke; Second Class explores whether working-class Americans can still access the American Dream; and The Left and the Jews will be out in June (title self explanatory!).

I’ve written for almost all the major publications in the country, and now I’m cutting out the middle man and coming straight to your inbox with daily news analysis, videos, updates, and reporting on the biggest stories of the day.

I would define my work as journalism that doesn’t allow anything other than my sense of what is true guide what I put down on paper.

In this business, you can prioritize a specific political outcome or you can prioritize telling your audience what you believe to be true, regardless of whether it ensures the outcome you most desire. As you already know, most of our discourse is created by people doing the first of those options. I believe I have a religious imperative to choose the second.

No one can be completely objective, of course. We are all slaves to confirmation bias. But you can do your best to best to acknowledge and fight that impulse, or you can elevate your confirmation bias to a virtue and only allow your journalism to go in one direction. That’s the difference between journalists today. It’s not whether they are objective or not (no one truly is). It’s whether they choose to elevate their biases into virtues and use journalism as activism for specific political ends, or whether they still strive for objectivity, for knowing their biases so they can best combat them and give their audience reporting and even opinion journalism that aims for a simple goal: to be as true as possible.

It’s not easy to choose the second option, though not for the reason most people think. On social media, people often accuse those they disagree with of “grifting,” as if the only reason someone would have arrived at their conclusions is because they’re being paid to. I think the truth is less cynical—though harder to combat: Journalists massage the truth because they think it will make the world a better place. They hide the failings of what they see as the side with the moral high ground in the pursuit of a better world. Scared they can’t convince you to agree with them that their vision of the good is the the thing worth voting for, they try to force you into by withholding information that might make the choice more complicated.

Many do this for cynical goals, but I believe even more do it because they think it’s a noble goal. The problem isn’t just that most Americans don’t agree with what our over-credentialed journalists have decided in lock step is the greater good (my book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy explores this at great length). It’s that manipulating information in pursuit of a specific political goal, even a good goal, is not our job as journalists. We’re not press secretaries. We’re not campaign managers. We’re not activists or politicians—or rather, we’re not supposed to be. Our job is not to make value judgments and report on the facts that support or flow downstream from those values. Our job is to present the truth to our audience so you can make value judgments based off true things about the world you live in.

Media credibility is in the toilet because way too many journalists decided it was their job to decide what you should value, and to hide from you what doesn’t promote those values. But it’s your job to decide what to value. It’s our job to present the most comprehensive view of the issues so you are best equipped to do that, and then to let the chips fall where they may. And while I am not perfect at this by any means, this is the ideal I strive toward. This is the kind of journalist I want to be and the kind I most respect and admire and find useful.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a point of view or my own set of values. These are my values:

I am at a very deep and unapologetic level America First, totally committed to the thriving of my fellow Americans and restoring the American Dream to the hardest working Americans. My overarching guiding principle is that defending the safety, freedom, and dignity of every American should be the highest goal of those in power.

I also believe that as Americans, more unites us than divide us. On nearly every issue, there is a consensus uniting the vast majority of Americans, and it is my view that it is important to stress those common values where possible and minimize the loud but unrepresentative extremes.

My values are rooted in my religious faith and my attachment to my homeland, which is spiritual in nature and consumes my soul. I am in my heart a populist, which means I believe the American people have a better understanding of what’s right and what’s good than the experts, and people in power should take their marching orders from the electorate.

Right now, it seems to me one side is doing better at representing the great American consensus. It’s why I call myself a “MAGA Lefty.” I’m an FDR Democrat who sees in President Trump a reincarnation of the socially moderate, anti-war, and pro-labor agenda of FDR. I’m a big fan of much of what Trump is doing and think it’s making America a better place every day.

But none of this means I’m not capable of arriving at conclusions that don’t line up with my beliefs. I am critical of the administration when I think it has missed the mark. I feel I have an obligation to explain my views to those not yet convinced by them, in a way that might convince them, with as much evidence as I can marshal. I also feel I have an obligation to keep an open mind and change it as often as the evidence merits.

My commitment to you is to give you reporting and analysis that reflects the full picture of what I believe to be true, whether or not it affirms my values. Most importantly for our purposes here, I feel deeply committed to the belief that as journalists, we have to respect our audience enough to make up their own minds about things.

That is what you can expect to find here: daily takes and reporting on the news driving the day, explained to the best of my ability, to arrive at what I believe to be true. I’ll also post my media appearances, original video content, and news about my forthcoming book as it becomes available.

For paying subscribers, there will be live, weekly Ask Me Anything video sessions, an ongoing subscriber chat, my NewsNation show in full, and more behind-the-scenes looks at everything I’m doing and working on.

Your support enables me to spend more time doing what I love, which is following the news at a deep level and writing about it. I’d be honored if you would consider subscribing at any level. I consider this job to be the highest privilege and I am truly humbled to get to do it.

One last note: If you want to subscribe and have access to paid benefits but can’t fit it into your budget, please let me know. We’ll work something out.