Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment | Hacker News Reader

Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

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237 pointsjanpio54 comments

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.

Liberalism or leftism? A lot of the modern trends you see from the left actually feel very illiberal.

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).

The claim that nationalism socialism is a type of socialism is dubious. Names are tricky like that. http://www.politicususa.com/2012/09/12/hitler-explains-gop-w...

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.

I only recently got into polygon. What can be toxic about video game coverage? Ie. What am I looking for?

All Vox articles:

"Why X Thing That a Mainstream Democrat Did That Seems Like a Big Problem Is Actually Not a Big Problem"

"Why X Thing That Person Who Is Not a Mainstream Democrat Did That Seems Innocuous Is Actually the Most Problematic Thing Ever"

> the "Liberal Smugness" piece

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.

Does anyone else deeply distrust Vox?

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.

Ezra Klein is unbearable. And their "Explainers" and "Here's what you need to know" posts give me the creeps.

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.

Totally agree. I'm just pointing out that their self-stated motivation behind news coverage is why some people dislike their format.

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.

I'd argue that Vox is closer to MSM than it's viewer's would like to believe. They're fact-lite and heavy on opinion; every party has 'em.

That being said I watch everything they put out on YouTube. Some of it's really good.

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.

I happened to be plugging him just yesterday on a discussion about the Obama administration on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791139

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:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/11/explaining-it-all

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.

Edit: word salad

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).

Their traffic is directly measured:

https://www.quantcast.com/vox.com

Indeed they are; Vox has improved the Q factor of the left wing echo chamber like nothing since the rise of huffpo.

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.

> They seem more interested in telling me how to feel

How very millennial. Perhaps it's on purpose.

How does Politico compare to Vox in terms of that liberal skew?

I think Politico general skews pro-hype, rather than pro either party. They run towards scandal.

Politico is more oriented towards hill gossip for politics junkies than news.

I totally think that when a Vox Media publication writes about Comcast that they should disclose the fact that Comcast Ventures owns a minority stake in Vox Media. However, I think it's a bit ridiculous to expect them to disclose this every time they cover one of their investor's portfolio companies. According to Crunchbase [1], there are 1,124 companies that share at least one investor with Vox Media. That's a pretty large list for editors to keep track of. I'm not aware of any publication that provide disclosure statements when they cover one of their investor's portfolio companies.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vox-media/insights/i...

I think the challenge arises in ascertaining whether or not there is an adverse incentive driving their reporting on a given story.

In the case of Snap it seems safe to conclude that someone asked them to write positive stories. The need to disclose all potential conflicts arise because we cannot trust the authors of these sponsored stories to honestly disclose that that is what they are.

"It seems safe to conclude that someone asked them to write positive stories." As the author of the article in question, I can tell you that this is false.

Yeah, that's asking a lot of journalists. We all know that writing high quality pieces is what Vox is famous for, I guess they just can't be expected to have the time to put something like "journalistic integrity" or "proper research" into what they write.

The Baffler, one of my favourite publications, nailed Vox a wee while back: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/explanation-for-what-johnson

I find the headline a little misleading. Reading it, I was thinking "ok, Vox runs an ad for Comcast - what's wrong, all the press runs ads, that's how they make the money, and why would they refuse to run an ad for Comcast?". Reading further, the allegation seems to be much more serious - that Vox run an article, purporting to be an editorial content, but in fact being, by its content, very close to an ad. Wasn't clear from the headline at all.

Which is strange, as Vox and it's child companies usually do a good job of disclosing things like this.

There was another example in this very article of them writing a glowing defense of Comcast, which they neglected to put a disclaimer on until a large outcry caught up with them. Where are you getting your opinion that they "usually do a good job of disclosing things"?

The Verge very often does, like in "The Worst Company In America"[1], there's a disclaimer. I listen to their podcast and whenever Comcast comes up (and always highly critical of the company) they recite the disclaimer before making fun of them for investing in them.

But, this article http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/2/14488212/comcast-protest-tr... from Feb 2 has a disclaimer down the bottom, but then this one Feb 8 doesn't http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/8/14554354/comcast-fastest-in...

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/19/6004131/comcast-the-worst-...

I think the problem is a lot of people go "I agree with essentially everything this newspaper puts out, thus this is great journalism!" when really good journalism would likely have you disagreeing with it as much as you agree.

Of course, since most people don't want to read things that they disagree with, the result is that most people don't want to read good journalism.

I think you oversimplify. Most peopke are more tolerant to bad journalism if it confirms their prejudices. And doing good journalism is harder than doing bad one. Thus it is easy to get away with bad one if you only care about click and/or only care for one ideological niche. But that doesn't mean there's no demand for high quality journalism - it's just harder to do it, so less people bother to. In nonpolitical topics, where prejudices are less strong, there is plenty of quality content. And if we stop supporting crappy content in political topics, it will happen there too.

This makes no sense, while Vox might sometimes post video stories on their discover platform, it's not particularly common that they do when compared to other partners such as mashable or buzzfeed.

Regardless, you see similar articles about Snap on websites that don't share any major investors with the company, so this argument doesn't really make sense.

If large stakeholders in Snap also had large stakes in all these media outlets praising the Snap IPO, would you say the same?

It's not really about what everyone else is reporting; it's the fact that no matter what the spin, they should disclose their ties to Snap's success so the reader is fully aware that this piece could come across as a back-scratch type of move on Vox's part.

I'm guessing that investment is now up 100% minimum..I wish I could have invested too when it was only worth $3 billion.

The question is, how far down the chain is a disclosure necessary? It seems like calling out conflicts of interest is a way to discredit someone or something without having to actually create an argument against it.

Being a regular vergecast listener they regularly disclose that the verge which is part of vox is invested by comcast. It's interesting that vox wouldn't when it's other publications do so even when they are just riffing in their podcast.

Is it any wonder that the youth distrusts media. The confidence seems to be disappearing quicker than a picture on Snapchat.

On a slight tangent, anyone else really annoyed by the articles which seem to be "company profiles" but really are PR puff pieces. They masquered as real journalism but they feel like content spoon fed by the company's PR manager. They tend to be at publications like Fast company, Techcrunch, and business insider. Anyone have a way to filter out puff pieces? I have been thinking about building an algorithm since these pieces now filter into more reputable sources like WSJ and Nytimes too.

Next you guys are going to think the CIA's contract with the owner of the Washington Post is a bad thing.

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