Hi, I’m Bill Palmer. Welcome to Palmer Report.

Palmer Report has a few million readers who swear by our track record of being consistently early and accurate when it comes to political storylines. There are also quite a few people who, despite never having even so much as read a Palmer Report article, are convinced that we’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to political journalism. How is this kind of dichotomy possible? For starters, there is more false information out there about Palmer Report than perhaps any other political news site on the internet. So allow us to set the record straight on some key points:

– Palmer Report is not just me. I named the site after myself because I believe in accountability. I don’t like getting my news from sites when I can’t figure out who owns or runs them, and neither should you. But despite the name, Palmer Report has more than fifty active writers. We’re not a one man band. We’re not a “blog.” We’re a political news outlet.

– Almost none of what you read on Palmer Report comes from inside sources. Instead, we provide analysis based on publicly available information. We simply piece together what’s really going on, and we tend to get there before most others do. Major newspapers often miss the real significance of what they’re reporting, or fail to connect it to other key pieces of the puzzle that have been reported elsewhere.

– Palmer Report’s track record of being early and accurate on important stories speaks for itself, yet the mainstream media has never given us credit for it. We were the first to piece together that the Trump Taj Mahal was busted for money laundering violations just before Donald Trump entered the election. Shortly thereafter, the Senate began asking the Treasury Department for details of the bust. We were also the first to piece together that the Trump Tower Russian email server was connected to Betsy DeVos. More than a month later, CNN reported the same exact story without attribution, labeling it “Breaking News.” We were reporting on Russian oligarchs flying into the U.S. on private jets for months before cable news touched it. There have been numerous other similar examples.

– We make a point of telling you where our information comes from, and pointing you to it. If we’ve connected the dots between something mentioned in the fourteenth paragraph of a newspaper article, and something mentioned in a tweet posted by a politician, we’ll tell you precisely where we got those tidbits from, so you can verify them for yourself. We believe proper sourcing and attribution are crucial.

– We don’t do empty speculation. We provide evidence based political analysis. “Speculation” is what you hear from cable news commentators who randomly throw things at the wall throughout the day without bothering to explain what led them to come to those conclusions. We focus on most likely outcomes based on available evidence.

– Because Palmer Report is often so far ahead of competing political news sites, some of those competing sites have retaliated against us with one dishonest attack piece after another. Some of these antics have been downright embarrassing. After a respected law professor retweeted a Palmer Report article, the executive editor of Business Insider had a meltdown about it on Twitter. Shortly thereafter, his publication wrote a scathing attack piece which made one easily disproven false claim about us after another. The Atlantic once wrote a wildly inaccurate attack piece about us that was so far off the mark, its author ended up apologizing to me via email, promising to fix it. He never did fix it, and instead The Atlantic later published another phony attack piece about us. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is commonplace when larger sites feel threatened by the growth of smaller competing sites.

– Various competing news sites have claimed that they dug into my background and couldn’t find any information about me at all, painting me as a shadowy figure. This is particularly bizarre, considering how easily accessible I am. I’ve been publishing on the internet in one form or another since 2003. I’ve been on Twitter since 2006. My readers have always known where to find me on Facebook. I was a music journalist for a decade. I’ve lived most of my adult life in the public eye. At the risk of sounding boring, there’s no mystery about me.

– I’m a liberal, but I find the “fringe left” to be liability to the left. I’m the first one to shoot down empty conspiracy theories that are at odds with the available facts and evidence. And I don’t allow my political views to get in the way of my search for the truth. Factually accurate reporting isn’t biased, regardless of the political leanings of the person doing the reporting. The difference between me and a newspaper is that I acknowledge my political leanings up front, rather than pretending I don’t have any.

– Palmer Report is not partnered with anyone. Most of the attack pieces written about Palmer Report have been centered around the claim that we’re partnered with one or more controversial political pundits. However, this is simply not the case, and never has been. It’s yet another false claim that competing news outlets have fabricated about us, in the hope of convincing you not to give us a chance. If you don’t see someone’s name on our masthead, we have no connection to that person.

If you’re not familiar with Palmer Report, or if you only know us by reputation, all we ask is that you give us a chance. Our longtime readers will tell you that they consistently know what’s coming long before the mainstream media reports it, because we connect the publicly available dots before anyone else. So take a look at what Palmer Report is currently saying, and then sit back as you later hear the same thing from the mainstream media over the coming days, weeks and months. That’s when you’ll conclude, as our longtime readers have, that Palmer Report is consistently ahead of the game with its political analysis.

Sincerely,
Bill Palmer
Palmer Report