When Vox launched I was very excited, as I thought it would be a good source of high-quality journalism, even if they did censor authors for having the wrong conclusions. However, it seems like virtually every article, even when otherwise high quality, contains some unrelated and unnecessary jibe at conservatives—an unusually direct example of Politics is the Mindkiller. Perhaps this lead to their being in something of an echo chamber, where conservatives stopped reading?
Here’s a recent example, to help make the above more concrete:
1) Trump signed a good law this week. Yes, really. - why does this need the snark in the title? The meaning would have been clearer, and less insulting, if they had just written “Trump signed a good law about HIV this week.”
I worry about this in general with Future Perfect. This behaviour is not something the EA movement wants, but if Future Perfect ends up producing a very large volume of ‘EA’ articles, we risk getting tarnished by association.
“Trump signed a good law this week. Yes, really.” presents conflict: here’s a person who you usually expect to be doing harmful things, and here they are doing something good. It can’t make that hook without assuming something about their readers, and the hook draws people’s interest. It’s not an “unnecessary jibe”; it’s the sort of thing that draws far more interest than a headline like “Trump signed a good law about HIV this week.”
It’s not a tradeoff I would make in my writing, but Vox is a left-leaning outlet and it seems pretty reasonable to me for them to write for a left-leaning crowd.
That’s a good point, but I think Larks is annoyed that they do make that tradeoff—they’re okay putting in jibes at conservatives because it potentially helps them with leftists.
My impression is that article titles are often not chosen by journalists, so politicised titles are a risk inherent to writing a column for Vox—the actual article on PEPFAR didn’t seem problematic to me.
When Vox launched I was very excited, as I thought it would be a good source of high-quality journalism, even if they did censor authors for having the wrong conclusions. However, it seems like virtually every article, even when otherwise high quality, contains some unrelated and unnecessary jibe at conservatives—an unusually direct example of Politics is the Mindkiller. Perhaps this lead to their being in something of an echo chamber, where conservatives stopped reading?
Here’s a recent example, to help make the above more concrete:
1) Trump signed a good law this week. Yes, really. - why does this need the snark in the title? The meaning would have been clearer, and less insulting, if they had just written “Trump signed a good law about HIV this week.”
I worry about this in general with Future Perfect. This behaviour is not something the EA movement wants, but if Future Perfect ends up producing a very large volume of ‘EA’ articles, we risk getting tarnished by association.
“Trump signed a good law this week. Yes, really.” presents conflict: here’s a person who you usually expect to be doing harmful things, and here they are doing something good. It can’t make that hook without assuming something about their readers, and the hook draws people’s interest. It’s not an “unnecessary jibe”; it’s the sort of thing that draws far more interest than a headline like “Trump signed a good law about HIV this week.”
It’s not a tradeoff I would make in my writing, but Vox is a left-leaning outlet and it seems pretty reasonable to me for them to write for a left-leaning crowd.
That’s a good point, but I think Larks is annoyed that they do make that tradeoff—they’re okay putting in jibes at conservatives because it potentially helps them with leftists.
My impression is that article titles are often not chosen by journalists, so politicised titles are a risk inherent to writing a column for Vox—the actual article on PEPFAR didn’t seem problematic to me.
Sure, that’s why I criticized Vox, not the individual author. I suspect the author did not complain about the title though.