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Matthew Yglesias
Author, Columnist & Political Analyst
Matthew Yglesias is the founder and author of Slow Boring, a subscription newsletter on American public policy that consistently ranks on Substack's politics top ten list. He's also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, the co-host of Grid's podcast Bad Takes, and the author of several books including most recently One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.
Before launching his newsletter, Yglesias was a co-founder of Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell, serving as the #2 editor at the then-new publication and launching the popular podcast The Weeds. Before that, he wrote the Moneybox column for Slate and was a pioneering blogger both at his own eponymous site and also for The American Prospect, the Atlantic, and Think Progress. He's written over the years across a wide range of subjects with a primary focus on economic policy and political pragmatism. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife (Slow Boring's editor and business director) and their son.
Seminars
"Covering Controversial Policy Topics"
Journalists aspire to tell true, interesting, and important stories without fear or favor. This is a difficult task under any circumstances, not least because people naturally disagree about what is interesting and important and they certainly disagree about what is true. The difficulties are in many ways compounded when the issue is the subject of intense ongoing social controversy. Any observation you make is bound to be read as an intervention in the controversy and bound to attract criticism - often from multiple fronts. One traditional approach to such controversies was to essentially duck them; to, in the name of “objectivity,” simply let each side tell its story and try not to do anything more. This has some obvious downsides - there’s nothing genuinely objective about giving equal weight to truth and lies.
At the same time, there is consistent pressure to set aside the search for the truth in favor of simply backing up the good guys - providing ammunition to the forces of righteousness while denying it to the forces of evil.
In a world where journalism is overwhelmingly (and increasingly) produced by young, college-educated professionals living in big cities and where partisanship and ideology are polarized by age, educational attainment, and the urban/rural divide, this means in practice pressure to side with progressive activists. Among the policy journalist’s peers - social friends but also colleagues covering non-policy beats - these are the people fighting the good fight, and undermining them makes you suspect, a bad ally, and likely a bad person.
And yet abstract values and a commitment to justice can’t settle a factual question. Activist groups are not doing journalism and have few incentives to make rigorous factual claims. The audience itself, though it would never admit this, often has little real desire for anything other than to have its own prejudices flattered. But to actually help people or solve problems you need correct answers to policy questions, and acknowledgment of uncertainty when answers aren’t available.
A favorite social media exhortation is to urge someone to “read the room” rather than make an unwelcome or annoying observation. This is excellent advice when socializing and stultifying advice for committing acts of journalism where your job is to offer the “inconvenient truth” and contribute precisely what is not already being said in the room. Social media - it’s right there in its name - blurs the line between media and socializing and encouraging groupthink and tribalism.
We’ll review some stories from the content wars, including the now-forgotten controversy that first made me a “contrarian” plus a couple of episodes where these instincts led me astray.
The main subject, though, will be group polarization dynamics and how they tie into sociological and demographic polarization in the American electorate and across various American professional groups. I want to introduce Julia Galef’s concept of scout mindset vs soldier mindset, and make the case for journalists as scouts.
At this point, the idea that America’s housing woes are rooted in large part in overregulation - especially in coastal liberal states - that makes it too difficult to build is no longer particularly strange or unfamiliar. This narrative has been embraced by leading politicians including the governors of New York and California and the President of the United States. Actually doing anything about it remains controversial, of course.
It's also a very different conclusion from the one reached with heroes & villains and “moral clarity” as the main frame of journalism. What could be more clear-cut than fights pitting rich, greedy developers against sympathetic community activists fighting for their neighborhoods? Except scholarship and dispassionate analysis increasingly reaches the conclusion that these “neighborhood defender” activists, whether well-intentioned or not, are actually at the root of many American problems. It’s important journalistically to listen to activists on the ground, to understand what they want and how they feel.
But the activist and advocacy communities around housing - to the extent that they exist - have traditionally focused on affordable housing subsidies and tenants’ rights organizing, not general land use. And there is simply a difference at each turn between trying to decide whose cause sounds most sympathetic and trying to understand which policy prescriptions will have which impacts.
In October 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden was on a campaign visit to Florida when Linda Carragher Bourne of Sarasota told him that her daughter was Miss Trans New England and asked what he would do to help her and her friends. Biden said that combatting anti-trans discrimination was “the civil rights issue of our time” and most progressives were inclined to agree without necessarily thinking too much about what specifically that entailed.
The next decade saw a significant increase in trans visibility, which following the unexpectedly rapid collapse of resistance to same-sex marriage rights really did become the frontier of LGBT rights controversies. Then just in the past few years, a substantial conservative backlash has emerged with many bills seeking to ban trans girls from participating in school sports teams and a new move to ban gender-affirming medical care even as in other places progressive educators seek to facilitate social transitions.
Where there is policy controversy there is bound to be journalism. But how do you cover factual controversies fairly when so many people are convinced as a matter of values that they already know which side is right? Is it possible to do rigorous journalism when you know anything you say will end up being a political football? Is it desirable to do rigorous journalism when it may add fuel to an ugly political backlash? These questions are roiling major American newsrooms as we speak and the discourse around them has become so nasty that it’s understandable many even-tempered people want to walk away from it. But it’s precisely the nastiest debates that need even-tempered and fair-minded people the most.
Special Guest: Emily Bazelon, Staff Writer for The New York Times Magazine and Author of "Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration"
By 2015, two decades of falling crime rates left the public ready to rethink “tough on crime” policies from the 1990s while the rise of ubiquitous mobile phone video brought home to white Americans longstanding complaints about police misconduct in a visceral and compelling way.
But while the injustice of the deaths of George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and others is manifest what to actually do about it is much less clear.
In the wake of Floyd’s death, activists swiftly coalesced around “defunding” police as a key demand. This was sound coalitional politics, as shifting financial resources out of policing and into other public services is welcomed by the civilian public employee unions who are cornerstones of progressive politics in most cities whereas pushing for changes to collective bargaining agreements that would make it easier to dismiss officers would have been received skeptically by civilian unions. But was it good policy? We will examine a moment when passions were running high, and many outlets simply abandoned the normal toolkit of policy journalism. Several years later, with public safety outcomes now much worse than they were a decade ago we need rigorous thinking about how to create safe communities and how to wrestle with evidence the same way we do when covering stories about health care or Covid data or any other complicated topic.