You might also say that Vox is in the business of confirming the priors of all of its readers while making them think they’ve happened on a counterintuitive insight.
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Vox is in many ways a representative—albeit a very extreme representative—of what has gone wrong in American media over the last two decades or so.
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I am not going to name names in this thread, but this is related to the problem Ben Rhodes exploited when he sold his preferred Iran narrative to a certain “26 year old who literally knows nothing.”
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Ben Rhodes realized that the DC media scene has hollowed out a great deal as many newspapers foreign offices were closed, outfits like the Atlantic changed their brand, and outfits like Vox started up. (He took advantage of this like a politician should, but that’s a dif thread).
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Foreign reporting is the example par excellence of the problem. Actual on the ground journalists in far off places were replaced by people with offices in DC whose job was essentially to just repackage the news. They were less reporters than narrative crafters.
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An exceeding amount of the drama of the last two decades has mostly been about the representation of events rather than the events themselves. It was true of the Bush media team and Fox with Iraq 2002-2006, it was a big part of why Trump was such a surprise, and
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It is at the center of the culture war touchstones. Well, most of them. It is also part of how politicians understand the problems they face—I am amazed at how much effort Bush and Obama put into press management vs actually accomplishing things.
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So you have a 24 hour news culture which impresses the idea that narrative management is what politics is about, a culture war that trains people to be hypersensitive to how they frame their own opinions in reference to everyone else’s, a media ecology that has been drained
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Of much of its grounding in actual boots-on-the-ground expertise, and a broader social media milieu that exposes you constantly to the opinions of everyone else all the time.
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It is going to be very hard to walk back from any of those, and each exacerbates our natural, human tendency to not want to appear crazy. But clearly it would have been a lot better if more people had been willing to appear crazy than actually were.
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It is important to qualify "in this instance." There have been and will continue to be important things down the line where fringe minorities will be wrong. Identifying correct contrarians takes discernment and we shouldn't overfit from the most recent historical episode.
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