Tuesday, October 18, 2022

One of these things is not like the other

I was a fan of Steve Clemons back when he was a big-named (relatively speaking) blogger. So I was excited to see that Semafor would publish a weekly newsletter with his stuff. The first one came today. I'm not sure if Steve writes the whole thing, but it included this bit, which I guess will be a regular feature:

Do you see the problem? These two things are not parallel at all. "What the left isn't reading" is something that was published in the New York Times. So um, probably a lot of left leaning people did read it. (And maybe the reason other "left-leaning outlets" didn't pick that up is because news organizations often don't publish publish articles about the polls of their competitors) On the other hand, what the "right isn't reading" probably is something that people on the right are not reading.

"What the left/right isn't reading" is some real bullshit bothsidesism framing, the kind of thing Steve Clemons might have flagged back in the day. But fine, if his newsletter wants to go with that feature, it will need to include much more fringe stuff to get things the left isn't reading, like whatever the latest dubious Hunter's hard drive revelation happens to be.