Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox | Hacker News Reader

Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox

theatlantic.com

49 pointsundefined121 comments

I love Matt Yglesias and listen to Weeds regularly. Folks like him, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi made their names attacking mainstream journalism from the left in the early 2000s. Now, they’ve decamped for platforms like Substack because they can’t speak their minds at liberal media organizations which in some cases they founded!

There is a great episode of Megyn Kelly’s new podcast where she and Taibbi commiserate about the direction of mainstream media: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/i.... It’s cats and dogs lying together.

I’ve been finding Glenn’s content hard to follow despite wanting more critical, independent journalism very badly. It feels contrarian and insubstantial since his exit from The Intercept, though. I haven’t read anything insightful or informative from him.

I don’t mean to rain on things. I would like to be more excited about independent journalism (and I was until I read it - I subscribed to his content immediately) but I’m really struggling to find much more value in the content than anywhere else.

What do you like about it? That’s a sincere question. Maybe I’m out of line here, not reading closely, being grumpy, something.

I didn’t read Greenwald before, and I don’t read him now. I included him in the list because he did attract a large following during the Bush era. I wasn’t a huge fan of Taibbi either, but his interview with Megyn Kelly really made me give him a second look. He’s has kids now (three, ages 2-6) and seems much mellower and down to earth.

I’ve consistently liked Klein and Yglesias. Both very detail oriented. By the way, Jane Coaston who does Weeds with them is a superstar. She’s on The Argument now too. (Both the NYT and Vox are vastly better and more nuanced in their Podcasts than their print media.)

Yglesias, Greenwald, and Taibbi are on Substack because they are minor celebrities, and Substack is lucrative if you're a celebrity. I object to the idea that Yglesias & Klein share a bucket with Greenwald and Taibbi; the former are serious policy pundits, the latter are trolls.

People talk about how Yglesias is unable to speak his mind, but David Shor is _ubiquitous_ in the mainstream media right now; nobody ever did anything better for that guy's career than the Civvis Analytics people who fired him. Not that you should let any of those people off the hook, the moral dimension of what they did is unchanged, but it's a strong bit of evidence against the idea that Yglesias was somehow being suppressed at Vox or anywhere else.

Yglesias will do better on Substack than as a cog at a media company, and that's fine. (I like him too.)

> I object to the idea that Yglesias & Klein share a bucket with Greenwald and Taibbi; the former are serious policy pundits, the latter are trolls.

This seems like a gross mischaracterization. I don’t see them as trolls at all. Do you just disagree with their values/ideas? What makes you use the word “trolls” specifically?

It's easy to be perceived as an important journalist when you've built an audience and are willing to take stories far past the evidence. Readers will reward you for doing that, because stories built on evidence are comparatively boring, and nobody wants anything from the news more than a compelling narrative. Even The Intercept has repudiated Greenwald at this point. But then, a unifying, totalizing conspiracy by the media against Greenwald is also a compelling narrative.

I don't know much about Greenwald, but Taibbi routinely distorts the truth to fit his narrative. I'm not sure if that makes him a troll, but it definitely means he's not a journalist (or at least a good one).

I agree Yglesias and Klein are more substantive. But although they’re not my cup of tea, Greenwald and Taibbi have developed a large following addressing surveillance and Wall Street, which is why I mentioned them.

I personally disliked Taibbi for the gross misogyny of his humor, but he sounds like a totally different person now that he’s a family man. Chastened and humbled.

I think the "Rule of Goats" applies to Taibbi w/r/t misogyny, but that's not really my problem with him; it's that he's a shoddy, incurious reporter that doesn't understand the technical details of what he writes about. All of his financial work is full of howlers, from not understanding the math of the NYC parking meter deal to not getting the difference between a PE firm and a prop trading shop to, at one memorable point, getting two different James Rubins confused.

What he does that people appreciate is create a fun-to-read, clear narrative about complicated subject, usually one in which there's a super-clear bad guy and good guy. You spend so much of your time on HN pushing back on good-guy/bad-guy narratives, I'm confident you can see what's crazymaking about someone whose entire shtick is built on doing that to make a buck. There's a reason his best-known venue is Rolling Stone.

> they can’t speak their minds at liberal media

In Glenn Greenwald's case at least, it turns out that if you actually assemble a team of excellent editors then they will do their job and prevent you from putting out profoundly bad content. His "unfiltered" phase is just pure contrarianism with no substance.

>Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”

That's truly pathetic.

Here's the letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

Even more pathetic is not the fact that she feels that way, but that she exists within an inter-institutional matrix of power that rewards and incentivizes her for feeling that way

Fire the firers

Quis accendet ipsos accenditores?

The free market. Cancel culture will.

If that letter is transphobic, then what isn't transphobic? Does the bar have to be set so low?

What I have a problem with is trying to equivocate between the Tom Cotton op-ed, which was authoritarian unamerican garbage and Matt saying "hey you know only 3% of Latinx people use the term Latinx, maybe we should chill a bit". These are not the same.

The real reason he left is because he can make a lot more money writing on Substack! He's still going to host Vox's flagship podcast!

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1327294634377289728

>He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

“There’s been endless talk since the election about House Democrats being mad at the ‘Squad,’ and others saying, ‘What do you want, for activists to just not exist? For there to be no left-wing members of Congress?’” Yglesias told me. “But there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.”

Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview.

This just hits the nail right on the head.

Ironic to see contrarian Matt to be defunded by the new Kundera contrarians. No doubt the perfect gruel for Conor, whose raison d’etre has been the libertarian concern troll who would vote for the Democrat if it just weren’t for that one thing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com