Thinking about this again, and it occurs to me that the ugly truth a lot of people on the left don’t want to face is that a successful leftist political network would want to take its cues from people like John Oliver and Wyatt Cenac. https://twitter.com/elsandifer/status/1324139590291214339

That’s not to say successful leftist news would be comedy programs; Oliver and Cenac are basically very good short-form documentary producers who work a very comedy-heavy style within that.

Probably a successful leftist news site would have a few comedy programs—it’s an obvious thing to run a block of after your evening news, and it has a proven track record as leftist news-propaganda.

But there’s a lot of other angles to take as well. The quirky but not quite comedy take of something like Bill Nye, the spiky crusading journalism vibe, the preppy hipster style of This American Life. There’s a lot of ways to do it.

But the core of a leftist news outlet is mostly going to be well-done deep dives and explainers, not shouting.

This makes the mistake I talk about in the thread of mine I QTed to start this, which is thinking that left-wing and right-wing persuasion work the same way. They don’t, because they’re persuading about fundamentally different things. https://twitter.com/daviddisab/status/1332413276966297601

The mistake is to reduce “the left” and “the right” to simple sets fo policy positions where the for and against arguments are the same type of thing. But this isn’t actually true.

“The left,” “the right,” and let’s not forget “the center” are all fully realized systems of aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and policy positions, which is to say they are all fully realized systems of aesthetics.

And because of that the arguments for each side are not actually the same sort of thing in the first place.

The distinction isn’t among entertainment, persuasion, and information—each of those can readily be either of the other two. It’s that the basic forms of persuasion for a reactionary worldview, a liberal worldview, and a leftist worldview are *radically different*.

Broadly speaking, fascism argues in anger, bombast, and the breathless cadence of perpetual crisis. Fox News does it extremely well.

The centrist liberal aesthetic is familiarity and comfort. “This is how it has always been, and how it always will be.” Classic CNN embodies it for news, but let’s not forget that most of its media is actually film and television.

The leftist aesthetic is largely inquisitive. It views complexity, depth, and nuance (as distinct from “both sides”ism) as actively pleasurable things. Exploration and empathy are big concepts here.

In each case, the form of the argument is selected by what is being argued. Fascism is arguing for paranoid aggression. Centrism is arguing for stability and tradition. Leftism is arguing for very big and radical things, and for the extreme individual agency of activism.

(Obvious caveat at the end of all of this: the major challenge to news media that tips to actual anti-capitalism is not the form of the argument, it's distribution.)