Reading List: December 22

Winter is upon us. But there are a lot of blazing analyses in your reading list today.

Naomi LaChance delivers a blistering analysis of Mother Jones for Paste Magazine. LaChance explains just how far Mother Jones has fallen from the ideals of its namesake… and it’s not pretty.

“We thought the country was ready for a magazine of investigative reporting that would focus on the great unelected power wielders of our time — multinational corporations,” wrote one of the founders, Adam Hochschild.

Even that goal fell away during the election when the dominant voices of the magazine took to championing Hillary Clinton, notorious for her alliance with Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobile, and TD Bank, to name a few.

Erin Gloria Ryan burns Lena Dunham’s performative liberalism to a crisp at The Daily Beast. Dunham recently caught flak for saying that although she hasn’t ever had an abortion, she wishes she had. Ryan was having none of that.

Treating abortion like a leisurely activity that Lena Dunham can personally help normalize represents a cartoonish version of clueless urban liberalism we’d be well-served to rid ourselves of. Dunham’s comments are free red meat for the sort of troll who believes pro-choice feminists spend their days praying to their lord and savior Margaret Sanger that they’ll get accidentally impregnated so they can have one of those abortions the gals at the nail salon can’t stop gabbing about. It’s not compassionate; it’s bizarre, a more obnoxious version of telling a person who has had their appendix removed that you, too, wish you could have your appendix taken out.

At FAIR, Adam Johnson subjects “explainer” news outlet Vox to a slow roast. How can the magazine pretend to be objective, Johnson asks, when it has so, so many conflicts of interest in the topics it covers?

While Vox coverage of its corporate parents, siblings and cousins isn’t uniformly positive, all too often it is. Even in stories that aren’t more or less verbatim PR copy, disclosures ought to be mandatory — especially when it’s as direct as covering Comcast and NBC corporate. For startups, major investors are tantamount to ownership in every sense of the word, and since traditional media companies disclose ownership, there’s no reason why this same standard wouldn’t apply to venture capital and private equity-backed New Media outfits.

Finally, I talk to the guys over at the District Sentinel about my hot take about the Clinton campaign’s lack of data security. I come in about 20 minutes here, but you should listen to the whole show.