Does anyone else deeply distrust Vox? The quality varies a LOT, they frequently present opinions as facts, etc.
The weird thing is they have moments of brilliance like the "Liberal Smugness" piece - but search "Vox News article" and it looks like even the left really hates them.
They seem more interested in telling me how to feel than the facts, I guess. I wish the rest of the world had the same pride in journalism as say, the Economist or the New Yorker
Vox and all its sibling outlets (Polygon, the Verge, etc.) have devolved into poison. They've surpassed Mother Jones as the Internet's premiere outraged bleeding liberal rag. Their headlines are physically painful to read. They are unabashed smug coastal liberalism.
Their videos are consistently high quality though. I'll go there probably once a month and watch a handful.
Vox is most certainly a liberal outpost. You're correct that many elements of the left reject liberalism, which is why Vox et al. are center-left liberal rags and not "leftist."
Leftist ideology is not mutually inclusive of liberalism (in the philosophical sense) but that's true of most ideologies. Heck, mix nationalism (extreme patriotism) with socialism (illiberal leftist ideology) and you can get national socialism (far-right Nazism).
I agree overall, but as a liberal I view them more like the religious right in relation to conservatives, ie they represent a rather small, specific, if vocal group of (neo)-'liberals'.
I could accept Vox (the site) being a leftist rag and just avoid but they really stepped over the line with the Verge. Increasingly weaker and weaker reviews, far more subjective reporting, and now even political articles bleeding over from Vox. I don't want a tech blog telling me how to feel about politics.
Emmett Rensin was very much the exception to the rule. (Actually Jeff Stein is ok too, and he's still at Vox.) But the general bias of Vox is neoliberal technocracy / American liberalism, so it's no surprise that leftists hate them.
They're utterly mainstream (ie, extremely reluctant to challenge established systems or common views) and much lower in quality than they'd like to be.
There was never any reason to trust them. I had hopes that the new thing from the Wonkbook dude would be interesting if not also quite useful. Imagine my disappointment to find Ezra just decided just to cash in and spin up yet another hollow, low rent, news blog crafted to target the American left.
Scott Alexander's "Reverse Voxsplaining" articles and The Federalist's occasional trouncing of Vox should be more than enough to kill any lingering notion the Vox brand is interested in journalism.
You're not alone in feeling a sense of distrust when reading Vox content. Like Mic, it's more of a finely-tuned fad-amplifying machine than a journalistic outlet. Above all, it seems to prioritize whatever flavor of outrage is popular with the kids at any given moment.
To be fair, though, Mic is almost a bad comparison because of just how much worse it is than Vox. But they certainly are thematically similar.
One of the reasons people seem to have an aversion to Vox's format is that it's not meant to be like the rest of news journalism. When they first announced Vox, it was described as such:
> Vox.com is news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines.
So, if you're accustomed to "the noise", I can understand why you might distrust Vox.
I wouldn't take the marketing-speak too seriously. Vox is no different than any other pageview-seeking news organization, all of which claim to cut through the noise.
Most "news" these days is just content created to drive page views by discussing hot current events. Vox included.
That's a great goal, and one which they don't actually pursue. For every great thing I've read on Vox, there seem to be 99 pieces of pure, unadulterated noise.
it definitely has an anti-trump bias but i actually enjoy it. their philosophy is to actually educate the reader about issues rather than just tell the newest facts. i.e. instead of saying a bill was vetoed, they'll go into the history of similiar bills and what the bill had in it and why it was rejected. while most sites would just tell you it was rejected.
MSM bias reflects primarily in opinions and reporting decisions. Most important events are reported by MSM in an unbiased fashion, as are (often) investigative reports. Vox does almost no original reporting and is just in the business of mixing up other news reports and opinionizing. In this, they are highly biased and to a large extent, they cherry pick news and views that conform with extreme liberal dogmas.
A good counterpoint to Vox is Real Clear Politics. Their front page features an equal number of direct links to opinion and news from both sides of the political spectrum. They also don't corrupt these links with rambling infantilzing '*splaining'.
This assessment feels accurate. Just tried to think of any digital-first journalism outlet in the U.S. that is focused on doing independent reporting rather than "telling people how to feel."
Came up empty. That feels true on both the conservative and liberal sides too. Opinion isn't intrinsically bad, but it makes me nervous that the CPM ad-based revenue model definitely incentivizes this type of 'newsroom.'
Have you looked into ProPublica or The Marshall Project? They're non-profits who focus on investigative reporting. ProPublica is general news but The Marshall Project focuses exclusively on the US's criminal justice system.
Emmett Rensin is the author of that piece, and he's an incredibly talented commentator and rising star. Now that he's building some credibility, he can be a bit pickier about where he publishes.
If you want pieces like that "Liberal Smugness" one, I strongly recommend Current Affairs magazine, and Jacobin (but Jacobin is more hit or miss). Current Affairs is pointedly against Vox.com, and has a piece explaining their opposition to it here:
My impression of New Yorker as an unbaliased source of news has significantly declined over the past few years. They clearly have a specific liberal perspective. Maybe subtle in their bias but nonetheless a persistent and one sided one.
The New Yorker definitely presents itself as sort of the informed liberal analysis, but David Remnick seems like a fairly professional if outspoken liberal editor. Not the type to spread untruths. Russia is also his speciality so he's not going to stay out of the commentary on Putin. It's hard to appear truly unbiased when it comes to political/geopolitical coverage.
Your read is generally correct. When Vix started their explicit mission was to focus on analysis rather than reporting. They figure (correctly, it seems) that people don't really want new facts so much as they want to know if/how/why these facts matter.
Vox was launched in early 2014 and has seen blistering traffic growth since. Given that they were able to grow so rapidly in an already saturated news media environment dominated by Washington Post, Time, CNN, WSJ, and New York Times, suggests they are doing something right.
They have not seen blistering growth since. They haven't grown much at all in two years, since the initial burst of growth early into their existence. The clock is ticking on Vox, they either have to generate substantial growth soon, or they're guaranteed to go under (these new media sites are universally red ink machines, betting on continual capital investment to try to get a lot larger, then the growth stops but the red ink continues and they go under, same business concept failure repeating over and over again).
Well put. Has the idea of a quality factor (Q) for a political "echo-chamber" been defined? Seems like an opportunity to inject some rigor into some commonly used terms.
One could measure the decay time of conspiracy theories through number of articles/posts published to determine the Q.
Or one could try to determine the bandwidth, as the allowed deviation from orthodoxy - a high Q chamber would have everyone parroting the exact same thing, whereas a low Q chamber would admit significant variability. Seems harder to quantify this measure though.
Also no reason to assume those two measures would be consistent. Needs a more rigorous approach to ensure self-consistency.
The weird thing is they have moments of brilliance like the "Liberal Smugness" piece - but search "Vox News article" and it looks like even the left really hates them.
They seem more interested in telling me how to feel than the facts, I guess. I wish the rest of the world had the same pride in journalism as say, the Economist or the New Yorker