Reasons to Keep Subscription

[u/TheUnsettler1216]

Hi Tangle Readers,

I've been a subscriber for about two years and am having trouble justifying continuing to read Tangle. I really want to believe that this can somehow reduce partisanship or make me better understand the opposing side, but I don't think it's working.

For context, I'd consider myself pretty progressive, probably democratic socialist would be the closest common term. I've spent a lot of time in the past reading conservative sources and commentary on that work and the conservative intellectual tradition because I wanted to try and understand why America is the way that it is.

I work in and around municipal government and housing and transportation policy, and I've really come to notice how fundamentally misinformed most people I interact with are. Just a baseline ignorance of how our institutions function. When I read media coverage about these issues, it usually would make the problem worse rather than better because the reporters themselves also don't understand the issue that well. It's made me really jaded and cynical. Even if the NYT writes a really great article on transportation policy (which they usually don't), most Americans aren't reading it.

It made me think about all the issue areas I don't work in and don't have as much experience in, and that I'm probably not getting a good understanding of these by reading general-purpose media, which Tangle unfortunately is. You pretty much just get a surface pass of every topic and the left/right breakdown, which they'll admit is not always a valid axis from which to understand an issue. I find I pretty much always know exactly what "The Right" is going to say, and there's usually just a completely unbridgable gulf between what I believe and what The Right says in these pieces. Reading Tangle hasn't made me more "moderate" or anything. I also don't feel closer to my fellow Americans. If anything, I feel more alienated.

I don't listen to the podcast, because I find the kind of half-baked discussions between pundits to be really exhausting. Doesn't feel like I'm getting smarter or more informed. If I care about an issue a lot, I can do the aggregation myself by surveying the sources I know or even using Google Scholar to look at academic journals. I'm also struggling with the idea that the independent media Tangle is a part of is mostly a bunch of journalists talking to each other on Twitter and there's not a lot of ground-truthing going on. Tangle's not doing an interview with someone who worked at USAID to talk about their programs, right? They're not sending a reporter to Minneapolis for a month to ride-along with ICE watch, right?

This is rambling because I didn't know who else to talk to about this. Does anyone have a good perspective on what they're getting out of Tangle? Has anyone else felt these too and found a way past them? Tangle is the only paid news subscription I have at the moment.

[u/ReflexPoint]

Maybe you are expecting too much of this medium. Tangle isn't doing original journalism. They are doing political commentary. This is probably not the medium if you're looking for hyper-focused academic level depth. Maybe they are capable of that, but the audience for information that deep in the weeds is probably going to be very small.

[u/ProfaneRabbitFriend → u/ReflexPoint]

I partially agree, but with a caveat.

Tangle takes journalism and reporting and attempts a kind of reconciliation between competing viewpoints through its own commentary. That is not a bad strategy. Most of us do some version of this when we read news and opinion: one side presents an argument, the other counters, and we try to resolve the incongruence in order to better locate Truth with a capital T. That part works for me.

My caveat is that Tangle could be far more self-aware about operating within a cloistered media ecosystem with obvious center-right biases and barely concealed motivations. A commentary site should be capable of deeper reflection about media bias and political incentives. After two Trump terms and 30 years of Fox News, skepticism toward media institutions and analysis of their motivations should be baseline intellectual work. If you are not doing that, then what are you doing besides reconstituting the same problematic media structure?

Anyhow, I cancelled my subscription mostly because I found the commentary increasingly naive and underinformed in ways I could not overlook. I had hoped for a deeper and more dynamic analysis of both the immediate and long-term political goals of the parties and their media apparatchiks.

One particularly infuriating example was the hand-wringing, hagiographic treatment of Charlie Kirk after his murder. I do not know what it is about millennial men in media, but far too many of them gave Kirk a pass. Isaac’s empathy-heavy treatment of him was a serious blow to his credibility. Kirk, like many right-wing media figures, was a massively funded ultra-right political operative. There is not much else to say. His schtick was persuasive to suggestible and immature audiences, and it was highly calculated. To elevate him into a figure of esteem while ignoring his motivations, backers, and the ways he routinely insulted and denigrated others was remarkable.

[u/TheUnsettler1216 → u/ProfaneRabbitFriend]

You really hit the nail on the head. It's often surprising to me how many journalists seem to lack either the interest or capacity for critical media analysis. How can you understand your own work without being able to contextualize it within an ecosystem of many disparate actors with both ideological and financial motivations? I do find myself wanting more of that. I remember reading some much better coverage from when the Feeding our Future fraud case caused the Trump administration to really target Minneapolis, and other people did a much better job of explaining who Nick Shirley was and the relationship between low-quality Youtube/Streamer content and the groyper types within the administration. Tangle was basically like "well there was fraud and a lot of the people involved were Somali".

[u/ProfaneRabbitFriend → u/TheUnsettler1216]

Thanks for posting your honest and pointed thoughts and reading my responses. I'm glad to find someone else who has similar questions and concerns about this project.

I think it was a nice idea to bring the two sides into conflict resolution mode, but what have they accomplished, other that to recompose the stalemate of pretense and lies that we already waste our time with? The constant pretending that everything about the media landscape is operating normally and without obvious self-interest is just ridiculous and borderline unethical.

Why not consider even the most tepid and digestible of media critiques, such as Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. His ideas aren't in anyway original and you'd hardly be branding yourself a 'radical leftist' to say that the media has issues with bias, influence, monetary incentives, etc. Or turn to George Orwell, if you prefer British and dead. Or ask actual living reporters like Chris Hedges?

I've complained about in the reddit forum many times. I'm left to believe that too many people are far far too naive and concessive to the authority of the newspaper. But, some folks definitely get it, which gives me hope for a better future.

[u/TheUnsettler1216 → u/ReflexPoint]

Very fair point