{"id":36269,"date":"2016-11-08T03:00:51","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T08:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36269"},"modified":"2016-11-07T10:58:32","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T15:58:32","slug":"voxsplaining-vox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/08\/voxsplaining-vox\/","title":{"rendered":"Voxsplaining Vox<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nathan Robinson<\/a> explains everything you need to know about Ezra Klein\u2019s Vox<\/em>:<\/p>\n

For the past two years, Ezra Klein\u2019s philosophy in running Vox.com<\/em><\/a> has been precisely this: people do not need facts<\/em>, they need explanations<\/em>. The ordinary person is ill-equipped to interpret the facts, to figure out what they mean. Klein rejects what he calls the \u201cMore Information Hypothesis<\/a>,\u201d the idea that a better-informed citizenry could have more productive political debates. In fact, because we see facts through partisan lenses, facts alone are useless. People are irresponsible with knowledge; facts just make them \u201cbetter equipped to argue for their own side.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus for Klein, the job of experts is not to give the public raw information, so that it can come to its own conclusions. The job of experts is to process the information themselves, and tell the public what it ought<\/em> to have concluded. They are not here to help you figure out what you believe. You are a hopelessly irrational consumer. They are here, rather, to tell you what to think.<\/p>\n

Vox<\/em> therefore does not hesitate to make strong judgments. Its headlines frequently declare that \u201cNo, X is not what you think it is\u2026\u201d or tell you \u201cHere\u2019s the real reason why\u2026<\/a>\u201d It promises to give everything<\/em> you need to know<\/a> on a subject, eliminating the need for further curiosity on the reader\u2019s part. If you don\u2019t know what the 18 best television shows<\/a> are, Vox<\/em> will tell you. (Quantification is its specialty; Vox<\/em> builds trust by knowing the numbers, by having the data<\/em>.) The Vox<\/em> \u201cexplainers\u201d say it plainly: about this, there can be no doubt<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yet strangely, Vox<\/em> staff would likely bristle at being called mere manufacturers of \u201copinion\u201d or \u201ccommentary.\u201d This is because when a Vox<\/em>-er declares a scandal to be \u201cbullshit<\/a>,\u201d he intends it as fact<\/em> rather than opinion. There is no attempt to distinguish between the journalistic and the editorial. It all blurs together as \u201canalysis.\u201d Vox<\/em> is therefore an exercise in the simultaneous having and eating of cake; it wishes to both make strong value-laden assertions and<\/em> be trusted as neutral and dispassionate. This means that Vox<\/em> inherently practices a crude and cruel form of rhetorical dishonesty: it treats matters of profound complexity as if they are able to be settled through mere expertise<\/em>. If anyone disagrees with what the wonks have concluded, they must be dumb, delusional, or both.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nathan Robinson explains everything you need to know about Ezra Klein\u2019s Vox: For the past two years, Ezra Klein\u2019s philosophy in running Vox.com has been precisely this: people do not need facts, they need explanations. The ordinary person is ill-equipped to interpret the facts, to figure out what they mean. Klein rejects what he calls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[86,1020],"class_list":["post-36269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-criticism","tag-progressives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9qZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36270,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36269\/revisions\/36270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}