ABOUT US

In 2012, our founder, James Ash, was a committed Tea Party conservative who was deeply shaken when President Barack Obama won a second term. Like many others, James had been immersed in a right-wing media ecosystem and was convinced that Mitt Romney would outperform what mainstream polls suggested. When that didn’t happen, frustration turned into something else: a determination to understand why.
 

What began as anger evolved into a years-long effort to fact-check nearly every media outlet, reporter, and talk radio personality he encountered. James fully expected this process to confirm what he already believed—that the so-called “mainstream media” was dishonest and biased, while the conservative outlets he had trusted for much of his adult life were accurate and fair.
 

The results were not what he anticipated.

Time and again, he found that mainstream news organizations generally made good-faith efforts to report facts accurately and responsibly. Meanwhile, many of the conservative media sources he had relied on were routinely spreading misinformation, distorting facts, and employing questionable reporting tactics. Confronting that reality was uncomfortable, but unavoidable.
 

Over time, this reckoning reshaped James’s views and moved him leftward on many political issues—not because of ideology, but because of evidence.

Today, with familiar narratives and talking points once again dominating parts of the political landscape, James reached a breaking point. He recognized how effective—and how damaging—unchecked disinformation can be, having once been consumed by it himself.
 

ECOCON was founded to bring accountability to an information ecosystem where it has too often been absent. Our mission is not to silence voices or promote partisan agendas, but to challenge misinformation, expose deceptive media practices, and help others navigate the fog that once obscured the truth for our founder.
 

We believe a healthy constitutional republic depends on an informed public. At ECOCON, we are committed to defending factual integrity, media accountability, and the idea that truth still matters.