A point I tried to make on our Politix episode with Will Stancil is that progressive-minded people — and particularly progressive-minded media figures — have a certain ideological investment in the promotion of bad vibes. Younger left-wing people are notably more depressed than politically conservative ones, which may be partially selection effect, but I think is driven by the
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A point I tried to make on our Politix episode with Will Stancil is that progressive-minded people — and particularly progressive-minded media figures — have a certain ideological investment in the promotion of bad vibes.
Younger left-wing people are notably more depressed than politically conservative ones, which may be partially selection effect, but I think is driven by the fact that so much progressive messaging about the world is marked by negativity and doomerism. I read a cool story last week out of the Bay Area about how BART brought engineering work for new rolling stock in-house, which wound up delivering the trains under budget and ahead of schedule. That’s an upbeat, positive news story that’s also straightforwardly left-wing in its implications. But that’s not the kind of narrative that gets traction in progressive media spaces, which are dominated by pronouncements about how we live in a late capitalist dystopian hellscape.
…it’s considered both un-progressive and un-journalistic to talk about good things rather than to expose problems.
Conservatives find it annoying that American journalists are so left-wing. But in practice, this generates a much more complicated partisan landscape than you might think. The conservative audience is alienated by the values of mainstream journalism and spends a lot of time consuming propaganda news that is optimized for partisan purposes. The progressive audience finds mainstream journalism congenial enough that it’s hard to compete with, and yet, mainstream journalism produces a steady stream of negativity and ultra-specific focus on the idiosyncratic problems of young urban professionals.
That is all from Matt’s (paid) Substack, worth subscribing to.
The post Matt Yglesias on the media appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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