We spoke with More Perfect Union founder and Bernie advisor Faiz Shakir
With punchy videos about corporate malfeasance, unaccountable billionaires and tech companies that act with impunity, this company has carved out a niche doing what mainstream media won't
It’s almost trite at this point to talk about how the news media industry has suffered since the emergence of Big Tech. Not untrue. Just a decades-long story at this point, and a dour one at that, as the picture keeps worsening in ways that have surprised even those of us who worked in the field for years.
A question often asked is who will fill the void left in accountability reporting, as newspapers and other traditional news programs recede. Will it be nonprofit outlets, funded by donations? Is it newsletters, like this very one you’re reading? Podcasts or independent creators on sites like TikTok and YouTube? Or will the billionaires come save the news? All of these approaches are out there, with some successes, a lot of failures, and often, a lot of flapping around in the unpredictable winds of the attention economy in between.
But one organization that seems to have hit the bullseye for this era is video-centric outlet More Perfect Union. Founded by longtime Bernie Sanders advisor Faiz Shakir in 2021, More Perfect videos have grown to be ubiquitous online, carving out a distinct niche shining a light on the way that our unequal society is increasingly tilted toward the powerful.
Some recent videos include a piece looking at how Google rigged its search to be less effective for consumers, what a Texas town emptied by ICE raids looks like, and how Elon Musk’s xAI was linked to a storm of environmental issues around a massive data center outside of Memphis. A video from last year, about a county in Kentucky that voted for Democratic presidential candidates for 144 years until Trump, recently won an Emmy.
More Perfect Union combines old school reporting values with the benefits of new media, producing mini-documentaries that are typically reported from the field and strike the delicate balance between quality and shareability. They depart from traditional journalistic norms in key ways, too. The pieces have an angle; the headlines ask pointed questions; and the subtext is clear: the rich, corrupt and powerful are rigging the game to benefit themselves. It’s a mentality about power — and the current state of it in the U.S. — that would rub many traditional media outlets as “partisan.”
But many videos underscore that these are not party-line issues; Trump voters in all sorts of places, like the formerly blue Elliott County in Kentucky, voice similar frustrations — showing the ground that the Democratic party and media organizations have lost in recent years.
We spoke to Shakir this week about the organization’s growth, how they balance politics with journalism, and why they’ve found so many Republicans who are receptive to their message. A lightly edited and condensed version of our chat is below.
Eli Rosenberg: Let’s talk about More Perfect Union. What’s your mission right now, how has it changed, and what’s your outlook?
FS: When we launched in February 2021, we wanted to be a video-first, YouTube-first organization. We didn’t launch with a lot of fanfare, with a splash in Politico or Axios. We just put out videos. The first featured Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who were organizing to form a union. Until then, most people had never seen their faces or heard directly from them.
That was the mission: build a video-based media organization to tell the stories of, by, and for working-class people. Video because the emotional valence of these stories is best conveyed when you can see, hear and feel it.
Four and a half years later, it’s going great. Our YouTube channel is closing in on 2 million subscribers. Last year we had over 200 million views, and over a billion lifetime views across all channels. The video-based concept has worked great.
The goal is to expand the breadth of economic justice reporting that we’re doing so remain relevant to today’s fights. Right now, we’re covering artificial intelligence, data centers, and the impacts on working-class people.
ER: I remember when you launched, there was a lot of coverage of workers and labor fights: miners picketing, Amazon employees organizing, fast food workers on strike. It looks like there’s been a shift toward covering billionaires and the technology-driven issues that are shaping politics. Was that a conscious pivot?
FS: I urge our team to think about when they wake up: what are working-class people struggling with, fighting for, or fighting against today? Staying present with that question is fundamental.
During the Biden era, there was more labor activity. Workers and unions knew they had a pro-labor president, a pro-labor NLRB, a pro-labor labor secretary. As a result, you saw organizing at Starbucks across the country, UAW expanding into places like Chattanooga, and a self-driven, entrepreneurial labor movement at Trader Joe’s, Apple and a whole variety of places.
As we’ve grown, we’ve devoted more time and energy to business stories: why certain corporations engage in predatory behavior and how it impacts people. That’s been there from the beginning—one of our first successful videos was about corporate greed and inflation, why prices were rising, and why the media wasn’t covering it. In this political environment, people are more aware than ever of how captured our economic and political systems are. They want to know who’s benefiting and how power is being used against them. And so we’ve spent a lot of time on that.
ER: What videos recently have resonated the most?
FS: We’ve gotten on the ground in Tennessee [or to cover] Bitcoin farms in Texas and other places, showing communities that are trying to not get fleeced by corporations that are rigging the rules in their favor. Oftentimes you're fighting a lack of transparency by some of these corporations, or the desire on their part to just execute “agreement” that is unidirectional that they're going to foist upon this community.
If you looked at the business videos we’ve done that have been popular, some have been about, how BlackRock's business model works or how at Dollar General, the pricing on the shelves is going to be different from the price when you scan the same item at the checkout counter.
We’ve looked at how John Deere fought farmers' right to repair in order to make billions of dollars a year. Another one that popped off was showing how Uber drivers in the same room were all getting offered different rates. Part of our service is transparency about how these business models are stacked against working class people.
ER: The work has a pretty direct political subtext. And obviously, your background is in politics. Do you see yourselves as a media or an advocacy organization?
FS: Both. If you go back to the founding of the United States to, let’s say Thomas Paine and his Common Sense pamphlets, or if you think about the Federalist Papers and their rise under Alexander Hamilton and then his fights against Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans at the time — it was understood that when you were doing journalism, you were doing advocacy.
It’s only the last few decades that we came under this notion that the best way to do journalism is “fair and balanced.” That people have to take themselves out of holding particular points of view. I have long believed that advocacy is one of the most honest types of journalism because you lay your biases out to people for them to understand where you're coming from.
The challenge from my end is that I want to show the perspective of working class people who by definition don’t tend to have their own platforms.
ER: They used to refer to “the voice from nowhere” in media, in the push for neutrality and “objectivity.” In the last 15 years, that's been called into question. What does it mean to not believe anything in a world where suddenly everything is up for debate?
Mainstream media organizations have been hamstrung on that front. That idea of objectivity also seems to have been very much informed the last 60 or 70 years by a business imperative to have as big of an audience as possible and to therefore be concerned about alienating consumers if you disclose anything about your stance or beliefs. But it's all out there anyways in how stories are framed. And most people understand that at this point. So telling people where you stand, being more transparent, is perhaps a smart call.
FS: What has happened to the media industry is no different than what has happened to really every other industry in America. If we were talking to farmers about the agriculture industry, we’d be discussing consolidation, the offshoring of jobs and the fact that the major [companies] want to deliver higher dividends back to shareholders. The primacy of shareholder value.
Whether you're a [company like] Uber or whether you run John Deere or The Washington Post, you're now a hyperscaler. You become more dependent on big tech, which tends to be your middleman. If you want to attract venture capital money, if you want to grow, you’ve got to lay off people. I've sometimes criticized the mainstream media. It’s like, you have a bias too. The bias is towards advertising revenue. Every story you do, you're trying to find a way to milk the most dollars back out of that particular headline, out of that particular narrative.
ER: Exactly. And it’s harder as so many media companies struggle to find sustainable revenue models. What’s More Perfect’s business model, and how has it been working?
FS: We’re a $7.5 million organization, up from $3.5 million in our first year. We’ve grown from about 10 full-time employees our first year to 35 now.
If you look at YouTube growth, you'll find that it’s the Megyn Kellys or Tucker Carlsons or Joe Rogans — people who sit in studios telling you things and having conversations. But we are carving out a different identity, doing what journalism needs to be. We're going to send you to this place, you're going to see it on the ground, and you may not like our perspective or whatever, but you're going to appreciate that somebody was there to capture news as it was happening. That takes resources.
When we started, I knew that if I felt pressured into scaling for profit and trying to show margins, it was going to be challenging. My feeling was you can only do this as a nonprofit, and to find people ideologically who want to give that an opportunity to succeed.
Increasingly the nonprofit has been working in different places, like The Texas Tribune, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, etc. The reason why is because it gives you the space to say that we want to be defined around a purpose.
But the next frontier for More Perfect Union could potentially be trying to do some for-profit entities that help deliver revenue to the nonprofit journalism. That’s what I'm exploring now.
For the sustainability of this particular enterprise, I think it would be best if it’s not just 90% philanthropy funded, but that over a period of time it's deriving value from grassroots donations, subscriptions, partnerships and collaborations, all the kinds of things that you see in the media environment. I’m playing with all kinds of potential models as long as they don't interfere or pollute the editorial mission of More Perfect Union.
ER: Where does the funding come from at the moment?
FS: These tend to be a lot of people who have been supportive of the economic justice policy work, who support labor and holds corporations accountable. That's groups like Open Society Foundations, Omidyar, Ford, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. It's hard to build up a grassroots fundraising basin [from everyday donors], but thankfully we’re now at 10 percent from that.
ER: I worked my way through a generation of trends in the media business. Longform. Social. Live video. Podcasts. Not podcasts. Then podcasts again. And on. You have gone with video and stuck with it. How attuned are you to trends like these?
FS: Particularly since Donald Trump got re-elected, we do a lot more shorts than before. Those verticals are delivering for us: we had 15 million views on vertical YouTube shorts last year, and this year already we're already well over 50 million.
The shorts succeed because they’re consistent with our editorial mission. For us, people know what they’re coming for. It might be a longform piece, it might be a short, but it all feels consistent. I guard that editorial consistency jealously.
I see a lot of media outlets who need eyeballs and growth. They jump to whatever is delivering in the moment. And as a result, you don't become anchored in an editorial vision. The audience knows less what to expect as they walk in the door. And now you've kind of lost the cultivation of community, ethos and mission.
ER: What kind of impact has the work had?
FS: I'd say that the impact for me right now is documenting the struggle for local communities over oligarchy. These economic justice issues actually are gaining sway with conservatives. When I go around the country covering things like data centers, you get a lot of these people are Trump supporters, yet they're very angry at Elon Musk or whomever is executing this particular data center against them. And that's where I still believe that there's huge power in the commonalities of our community. And it goes through the thesis of [what we do.]
Data centers have been at the forefront of it. Tucson was one of the first instances where were on the front end of a city council vote, which is what I want to do more aggressively — advertise in the community. We’ve been following similar issues in St. Charles, Missouri and San Marcos, Texas.
We are learning from these communities quite frankly. You've probably seen it at the end of our videos. We say, “Hey, if there's a data center for in your community, please write to us.”
ER: Thanks for chatting, Faiz.
Some More Perfect Union videos:
He Voted For Trump. It Cost Him His Job
Private Equity Is Coming For Your Pets
How Scammers Hijacked American Healthcare
Sports Betting: What DraftKings & FanDuel Don’t Want You To Know
Why Young Men Don’t Like The Democrats
See you all next week.