Their videos are consistently high quality though. I'll go there probably once a month and watch a handful.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Most "news" these days is just content created to drive page views by discussing hot current events. Vox included.
That being said I watch everything they put out on YouTube. Some of it's really good.
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'.
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.'
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:
Edit: word salad
Their traffic is directly measured:
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.
How very millennial. Perhaps it's on purpose.
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