What is the Vanguard?
The free press, once heralded as the fourth branch of government and the watchdog for society, has been swallowed up by legacy media, which more closely resembles a swarm of corporate vultures than the watchdog adversaries they proclaim to be. Local papers across the nation have been shuttered, and many of those who have managed to hang on have resorted to dramatic staff reduction. American media continues to be dominated by the legacy networks, which in turn are owned by massive media conglomerates, who acquire any promising competition in their market with their endless treasure trove of assets. Now just 6 corporations control 90% of all American media, allowing them to set the narrative of the political conversation and manufacture public consent for senseless wars, phony politicians, and criminal corporate bailouts.
The Vanguard is an effort to contribute to the counter-narrative, to take to the streets of this country and talk to real people, from all backgrounds and experiences. To dispel the spurious, far-reaching, conjecture that our nation is too deeply polarized to reach a consensus. We must provide the proletariat with an alternative story to the one being proffered by the pundit class on both ends of the partisan spectrum.
It was once said by the great doctor of journalism Hunter S. Thompson, that there is no such thing as objective journalism. “Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of…The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” Everyone has a perspective and thus a bias, consciously or unconsciously. Those ideological glasses with which one perceives the world cannot be removed for the sake of reporting. Everyone has a motive; legacy media is motivated by profit from ad revenue, we are motivated by a desire to swing the power balance in this country away from corporations and back into the hands of the people. We will rely on support from direct contributions from readership and subscriptions alone, and as such we will be accountable to no one but our readers. Just two dudes chronicling the apocalypse.
– Zac Polston & Gavin Miller-Broomfield, Founding Editors of The Vanguard
