The truly astonishing sums of money that Vox Media has been able to raise (from Wiki) --
In December 2014, Vox Media raised a $46.5 million round led by the growth equity firm General Atlantic, estimating the media company's value at around $380 million. Participants in Vox Media's previous rounds include Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. Other funders are Allen & Company, Providence Equity Partners, and various angel investors, including Ted Leonsis, Dan Rosensweig, Jeff Weiner, and Brent Jones. According to sources, the Series C in May 2012, valued Vox at $140 million. A Series D valued the company north of $200M, raising an additional $40M.
In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in Vox Media Inc., valuing the company at more than $1 billion...
-- has allowed them the financial wherewithal to do what many scientists had long thought to be impossible.
Finally crack the technology necessary to distill over 1,000 David Brooks Column into one, long David Brooks column!
From Lee Drutman at Vox:
We need political parties. But their rabid partisanship could destroy American democracy.No judgement about the factual accuracy of anything. No record of how we got here that names names and allocated responsibility. Nowhere is Lee Atwater mentioned. Or Newt Gingrich. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or Regnery Press. Or Fox News.
...
But for years now, we’ve been retreating into our separate tribal epistemologies, each with their own increasingly incompatible set of facts and first premises. We’re entering a politics where the perceived stakes are higher and higher (“the fate of our nation lies in the balance”) that they justify increasingly extreme means...
To the political left, Donald Trump is un-American: His xenophobic, racist rhetoric stands in opposition to the true American vision of tolerance. It’s an affront to our nation of immigrants, a country in which equality is written into our founding documents. Any Republican who supports or voted for him is guilty by association.
To the political right, it’s the Democrats who are un-American. They denigrate our founding as a Christian nation and want to secularize everything. They want to sacrifice our sovereignty to globalist institutions under the guise of invented problems like global warming...
When Barack Obama was president, many Republicans treated Obama as illegitimate. “Where was the birth certificate?” they repeatedly asked. “He’s not an American. He’s not a Christian. He’s not my president.”
Now that Trump is president, many Democrats have adopted their own delegitimizing narrative. “Clinton won the popular vote,” they say. Or “Trump is only president because of Comey.” Or: “If the Russians hadn’t hacked the election, Clinton would have won.”
...
Just the same old Voice From Nowhere that got us into this mess, reciting the same old, toxic catechism of Both Siderist talking points from high atop a very large mountain of money.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
6 comments:
When Barack Obama was president, many Republicans treated Obama as illegitimate. “Where was the birth certificate?” they repeatedly asked. “He’s not an American. He’s not a Christian. He’s not my president.”
Now that Trump is president, many Democrats have adopted their own delegitimizing narrative. “Clinton won the popular vote,” they say. Or “Trump is only president because of Comey.” Or: “If the Russians hadn’t hacked the election, Clinton would have won.”
Both sides do indeed see a president who is illegitimate (and in the case of Trump, bizarrely incompetent). They make those judgements largely (though not completely) on the statements in those two paragraphs.
The first paragraph contains statements that are not true. The second contains statements that are true.
Conclusion: the thesis that both sides are doing something equivalent is disproved. And disproved even by just the information provided in the article.
Sorry, sheeple, just gotta arbitrarily mark down yer silly "proven facts" to keep them on par with the paranoid delerium of cryptofascist window-lickers ... because ratings!
Post-tribal epistemologies are of course unthinkable, let alone as both extant & popular.
Oh brother. I thought that Vox was better than this. The clams from the left range from probably true to certainly true. The claims from the right are all demonstrably false.
Inspired by Lee Atwater channeling Goebbels.
Vox is data-driven: 9 out of 10 beltway journalists agree that Both Sides Do It®!
So... add Mr. Drutman to the ever-lengthening list of writers not to be taken seriously.
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