by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Ahhh, Vox. Something about Vox — or, specifically, its video presence on Tik-Tok and its general media coverage — really, really, REALLY FUCKING GRATES ON MY NERVES.
But I honestly don’t know why.
I’m even reading — and enjoying — Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” book. It’s really good and I highly recommend it. It’s very insightful. And, yet.
I’ve given it some thought and I think it’s that on Tik-Tok the highly educated elites who dabble in the service want to come across as some sort of hip youth pastor to the rubes like me. At least with, say, traditional mainstream media on TV there’s an established construct of authority. But on Tik-Tok, these people who are very, very smart and very, very well educated want to turn their chair backwards and talk about how Shakespeare is really rap.
Oh, please.
There are plenty of people who are doing a great job on Tik-Tok presenting the news but Vox ain’t it. They need to ditch the pretense. We aren’t equal — and least I suspect they don’t think I’m their equal — and if they came across an idiot like me in real life they would do everything in their power to get as far away as possible.
Vox’s media coverage is even worst. It comes across as the distillation of every woke — and high — late night college freshman conversation. All art is reduced to its tropes, microaggressions and perceived slights to this or that part of the world of identity politics. Whatever happened to enjoying a good story and worrying about THAT? Or, put another way, instead of bitching and moaning about if a story has two women talking about something other than a man at some point, how about…telling me is it a good story? Does it convey emotion? Do I care about these characters?
I guess some of this comes from be being too old — and poorly educated (went to a public college, natch) — to quite fit Vox’s intended demographic, and, yet, generally otherwise digging what they have to say. So, this leads to a certain amount of cognitive dissidence.
