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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I knew as soon as I saw the source, this would be the case....Matt Yglesias isn't exactly...honest. He has a history of false claims and or really bad ideas. More of a commentator than a journalist, though somehow he is treated as one by Vox.

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Could you post examples of when Matt has made false or misleading statements? The way you characterize his journalism doesn't seem accurate to me.

I think the fact that he deleted almost all of his past tweets because they came under fire...including one that stated that the Nazis had some good ideas, is a solid example. He often strips things from MMFA and Think Progress (which he used to writer for!) without fact checking them at all. He helped perpetuate the idea that cross hairs on a map caused violence. When Obama was in office he falsely lowered the national debt by trillions of dollars to make things not sound so bad. So, so many examples. Don't even get me started on the "Voxsplainers."

On Twitter he is basically considered a joke on both sides of the aisle.

Who is not considered a joke by many people on both sides of the aisle?

He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.

If that's what you want to believe, but it's not true. He is not really respected by anyone except the people that he brought over from Think Progress. Not sure what's respectable about things he's said in the past or continues to say. He deletes them...because he knows they were dumb. One of his "expert" economic reports was that the US should simply print its way out of debt, raise the minimum wage to $100 and let the Fed figure it out...all of which are laughable to any actual economist, yes including left wing economists, because it would actually impoverish the poor even more. His platform is to rile people up, not actually convey real ideas or solutions. That is why he's a running meme on both sides of the aisle and his flippant regard for facts has more than carried over to Vox.

He co-founded Vox, so bias in that direction isn't terribly surprising.

What amazes me if that Vox has a show on Netflix that is supposed to explain things when their organization is notorious for getting basic things wrong. Look, everyone gets something wrong, but they sometimes do so with intent to mislead.

I'd say they are worse than Fox News. Fox News gets a lot wrong, yes, but also everyone knows their entire prime time lineup is opinion...Vox makes no such distinction. If you're pretending to be straight news but you're opinion...that's a big problem to me and worse than misleading commentary that you know is commentary.

I've seen Matt literally copy something straight from MMFA (a liberal news watcher) and Think Progress (a liberal think-tank) and treat it as news...not commentary.

Wait, who believes that Vox isn't opinion? Personally, I have always treated all their stuff as op-eds.

Maybe the fact that they have a show on Netflix called "Explained" and Ezra, Matt, etc all list themselves as journalists.

I mean, it's kind of in the name.

Agreed on Vox and Fox. The thing I find most stunning when people bring Fox up is they still think it’s 2008 it seems. Fox News isn’t bad, Fox Opinion isn’t good, but it’s more fair than it was... largely because GOP-Actual doesn’t like and didn’t want Trump.

I suppose it’s a bit funny to me that Vox articles often make it to the front page of HN, but FoxNews just don’t. But yea, Vox is worse.

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