My old boss Monika is pissed off at this illustration from Axios:
The problem here is not labeling Fox News as "right leaning," which is sort of defensible since the thing that makes Fox unique isn't so much ideological extremism as it is its laser-focused fearmongering and appeals to racism. The problem is labeling Mother Jones as "far left."
I know this will sound like special pleading since I used to work there, but this labeling demonstrates two things. First, it's astounding how long old reputations last. When MoJo was founded, nearly 50 years ago, it was a far left magazine. But for better or worse depending on how you view these things, it hasn't been for at least the past 20 years. It's a consistently progressive magazine, but it's solidly reported and far from radical.
Worse than this, though, is that this label shows a real paucity of awareness about the left. The far left, depending on how you pigeonhole things, is either (a) loud and bomb throwing or (b) ideologically extreme. And those things do exist. We have bomb throwers like Truthdig and CounterPunch and ideological extremists like Jacobin or Current Affairs, but MoJo is neither one of those. It's not even as lefty as The Nation.
It's easy to argue that this doesn't matter much. But for people whose lives are dedicated to politics, they really should know better. My own view is that MoJo isn't really more or less progressive than most other progressive magazines, it's just different. It spends less time on the business of Washington DC and more time telling deeply reported stories of how that business affects people in the rest of the country.
Anyway, that's that. This habit of continuing to view MoJo as some kind of quasi-communist rag has annoyed me for a long time, and this is a good time to get it off my chest. As someone who worked there and read the magazine religiously for a dozen years, I can say with some authority that it just isn't so. It's way past time for people to get this right.
Current Affairs is melting down right now because it's founder turns out not to be so dedicated to socialism when it means he has to give up power.
No "far left" publication would employ Kevin Drum as its featured blogger for more than a decade.
Yup.
... Speaking of odd ideology bedfellows, I sometimes wonder how FOXnews -- & MSNBC -- would have been different had Roger Ailes brought Chris Matthews* with him from CNBC to FNC in 1995 when it was getting off the ground. Matthews would have been in the primetime leadoff spot that ended up with O'Reilly, & while he's conservative, he's not FOX level unqoncious in his retrogradedness.
*Plus, Matthews was a FOX Network alum from his time as commentator on Front Page.
lol
That's true but mainstream left was not an option.
Lol, there will be NO giving up hippie-punching until the current generation of La-Z-Boy warriors, who have been stewing for 60 years about missing out on all that easy sex they read about, passes from the scene. They have a lot of disposable income and a lot of time on their hands, and they are the mother lode for almost every medium except theater-release feature films and some newer social platforms.
(And btw likewise soft-selling the overtly violent, Fascist, racial-supremacist Right.)
I would think there is a rather more fundamental problem demonstrated by that chart, one that isn't necessarily unique to Mother Jones if perhaps their magnitude is greater. That would be the 40+% loss of viewership.
Maybe that's because they lost Kevin Drum's blog.
Setting the specific labels on the chart aside, is Mother Jones "more left" than Vox?
This feels tied in with the whole false-equivalence, what-aboutism that's plagued American discourse since at least the Reagan administration and increasingly so over the past few presidential terms. It's perfectly fine and "just a difference of opinion" that the far right engages in authoritarianism, racism, discrimination, and an abject rejection of science and rule of law to the point of rekindling a pandemic and attempting a violent insurrection … but there's hand-wringing when "the far left" makes demands like universal healthcare or an improved social safety net or accountability for police … you know, stuff that most of the rest of the civilized world has had for decades. And even (especially) moderates and Democrats succumb to this worldview.
Sure, there's a truly radical far left, but it's pretty small it doesn't have the entrenched media soapbox and they don't have political power like the radical far right does with the entire Republican party.
Suspect its the name as much as anything else (though ironically, Mother Jones the person wasn't as much a radical as she's become in popular imagination either.)
I fear many folks don't update their thinking with the times and evidence. Rather sad. Sort of a republican thing I believe.
There is again the problem of trying to fit everything into a single right/left continuum. Like the NY Times and some other mainstream outlets, MoJo is now liberal on social issues but not strongly leftist on economic issues. It is certainly not strongly pro-labor as the name might imply. Kevin's views have been somewhat similar.
As Kevin implies, Fox does not really emphasize ideological or even economic positions - it is focused on partisanship, primarily based on race and religion. It pushes the issues, including those based on lies, that are likely to arouse support for Republicans. The ultimate aim of this is to get support from low-income whites for the Republican economic policies. The plutocratic objective of Fox propaganda is largely hidden.
All this (and more) just can't be fit into a single left/right parameter.
Looking at the chart, it seems to me that the whole effort to show differences between the ideological categories didn't pan out. There's no there there.
Absolutely right. I consider myself a left-of-center independent. I ready MJ pretty regularly and it varies in "leftiness," but labeling it grossly as "far left" is just brain-dead.
it seems, if in this day and age one propagates universal health care and minimum wage - basic human rights - one is a radical leftist. 🤔
Trump drove traffic but there was also a kind of exhaustion factor. Who can read the news 3 hours a day forever?
We tossed a would-be dictator out with an election. Bravo. People deserve a breather.
"It spends less time on the business of Washington DC and more time telling deeply reported stories of how that business affects people in the rest of the country."
There it is! You can't get more pinko, communistic socialism than that. How national policies affect the population!!!
What's more "far left" than caring about the little people?
It has always amazed me that no one on the right actually understands much of anything about the left or right.
Why can't right-hegelian morons figure out what "homosexuality is the enemy of the proletariat" means??
And to top it off, that decline was strictly post-KD effect.
There are no "far left" publications in the US unless the CPUSA puts something out.
I'm sure the scale just includes US media. Why would foreign politics be relevant?
Heh. When my right leaning friends say anything about "The Librul Media", I like to ask them, What? You mean The Nation? Mother Jones?
And, of course, they've never heard of either. So I emphasize that they don't know what "liberal" is.
Pretty laughable that Mother Jones is characterized as far left, if that's the case where do you put Noam Chomsky? This is just American insularism, and even then it's goofy, Mother Jones is actually pretty vanilla left-center (as opposed to center-left), and economically I don't pick up any radicalness or even all that much drift from the mainstream (it anything, still calling itself Mother Jones does a disservice to the namesake).
mainstream liberalism, meant to say
Kevin seems to have missed that the choices were leans left of far left. As he himself states, motherjones is a progressive magazine, i.e. either on the left side of the democrat party or to the left of the democrat party. Given the choice of leans left, such as Joe Biden or far left, all progressives should end up in the far left bin and liberals and moderates in the leans left bin.
Biden doesn't lean left at all. Biden is moderate right.
I've found Media-Bias Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/) to be a useful guide to where resources live on the liberal/conservative spectrum - at least they seem to confirm my bias. It lists both MJ & Washington Monthly as "Left-center" and rated high for factual reporting while the Nation is "Left" and also rated high on factual reporting. Both Fox News and National Review are id'd as "Right" and rated 'mixed' and 'mostly factual' for factual reporting respectively.
Foxys are paid to lie .
Well hell. I thought I was subscribing to a Socialist Rag! Now I gotta figure out how to subscribe to CounterPunch and Jacobin?