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Well I’ve also flipped the bozobit on the NYT entirely. It works purely to perpetuate its own profitable media hegemony at this point and will serve any other interest and co-opt any other tool to that end. Wordle and the occassional deep investigation piece do not redeem it.
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Ezra is of course a prime mover of explainer journalism in the last decade and I have a whole other problem with that, which I did a rant about over the weekend.
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Just hit me that explainer journalism is the one genre of modern pre-Weirding media that survived the Great Weirding completely intact. Didn’t miss a beat. It got big explaining the subprime crisis and has taken everything since 2007 in its stride.
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There’s a whole field of anti-explainer study in my corner of the blogosphere 🤣 I don’t unreservedly dislike them since there is a minority of good ones, but overall it’s a grifty part of blogo-newslettero-podcasto-sphere just a notch above Taboola-grade click farming
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I am somewhat sympathetic to both POVs here since I started to straddle both spaces (so you can argue I have no cred to critique either!). I have definitely had editors in popular press edit out all references to theory, even accessible “pop theory”, in writing I submit.
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I assume whenever I write something that touches on an academic discipline I’m not part of, 20 very angry people will find me on twitter to tell me why I am completely wrong/outdated ab their field. :) It is a good opportunity to learn but, I get their frustration.
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It’s also home to the most hostile practitioner-theorist divide on normative questions after political science. Ezra Klein doing a media theory op-ed is like Putin doing an op-ed on governance. It’s not that he lacks expertise. It’s that he’s the natural object of theorizing.
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