I would certainly like to embrace rich liberals investing in media in many forms, but I am skeptical for many reasons. Happy to be wrong!
There are many reasons why journalism is not attractive to wealthy donors. The pitch for funding real journalism is, essentially, “Give us money. You can’t tell us anything about what to do with it. Then we will write stories inimical to your interests. Over the course of years, civic society will be strengthened.” This tends to strike rich people as unattractive. They are generally looking for something more along the lines of, “Our publication will be the equivalent of injecting an undecided voter with a powerful drug that will indoctrinate them into our way of thinking, like an acid-crazed Manson acolyte.” Journalism cannot promise this sort of ROI. Propaganda can. The confident pitches of propagandists often turn out to be little more than attempts to soak well-intentioned rich people for as much money as possible, using oversimplified promises of grand influence in record time. Oh well. That’s what you get for believing propagandists.
And those confident propagandists will have little success especially if they are constrained by the idiosyncratic desires of donors and are expected to fall in line with the Democratic talking points of the week.
I used to complain that the Dem party had shitty message discipline, in the sense that they lacked it. Now they more have shitty message discipline in the sense that they try to impose shitty messaging on all electeds and Groups. Too much discipline on shitty messaging, as they are convinced that one stray comment from a barely affiliated rando will force them all to apologize.