Is Axios, a relative newcomer to the news media, trustworthy?

[procon]

I really wanted to like Axios, I like their articles, and their reporters are getting a lot of airtime on MSNBC. On a lark, I did a bit of a search and now my suspicions are growing.

Wiki says: Axios' initial launch partners are JP Morgan & Chase Co., PhRma, Boeing, BP, Bank of America, Koch Industries, S&P Global, United Health Group, Walmart, PepsiCo and Cooley LLP.

New Republic describes Axios as "a stenographer for the powerful... There are too many incentives for it to continue to transcribe the talking points of moguls in big business and politics. At a time when the two are dangerously intertwined, a credulous publication becomes dangerous as well."

Jacobin, a left-wing news magazine, says: "The trendy new media outlet Axios is a thinly veiled scheme to give corporate America direct access to ruling elites."... "While at Politico, Allen took payments from businesses in exchange for favorable coverage"... "For companies like Koch Industries, Walmart, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, and the others listed as Axios’s partners, this is the dream: to run public-relations campaigns that people trust, while spinning the news to the company’s liking. VandeHei and Allen’s ingenious new idea is a thinly veiled scheme to give their corporate partners exactly what they want."

"That’s because Axios isn’t really a news media company: it’s a lobbying firm. It exists to peddle a pro-capitalist line to readers in the guise of journalism. It passes off a series of corporate ciphers as knowledgeable experts and tells its readers they should trust them."

Does it look like Axios can be a reliable and unbiased news source?

[AngryAmish]

1. Most media outlets are megaphones for corporate interests.

MSNBC, NYTimes, wash post etc

None of them can be trusted.

[Me.]

2. Same People Who Put Together Politico

Vanderhei, Mike Allen etc......are behind this

[yallerdawg]

3. I find them trustworthy.

They source material in support of their reporting, and they do not seem to lean right - which is a dead giveaway of opinion-slanted propaganda.

The 'left' does not do propaganda - right?

[tableturner]

4. I find them very trustworthy.

I know they have sponsors and I have been watching for signs of bias in any particular direction. So far I have only seen honest reports of what is seen or heard. They DO have to pay their bills, and sponsors obviously are key to that. The same can be said for any media company.

Mike Allen's morning email is very good!

[blogslut]

5. It's Mike Allen.

He gets access by being a bit of a right-leaning sychophant but I've never known him to print lies.

[dmalone01]

6. I'm the author of that Jacobin piece

Hi everyone. My name's Dan, and I (unfortunately, in these times) care deeply about media ethics.

Axios' factual reporting is, in my experience, fairly sound. The name of the game for them is access to the powerful, which is a two-way street. They've managed to cultivate a high degree of trust with their very well-connected sources, which gives them myriad exclusives, but also gives them a lot of very powerful people it's in their best interest not to cross. If you believe, as I do, that an instrument of the free press must have an adversarial relationship with those in power, then you understand why that's not such a good thing.

They've also got a bad habit of passing off opinion as fact. The example I use in the Jacobin article is a post on Axios saying a backlash against Uber was unwarranted, which contained factual errors and nothing marking it as anything other than a straight news story. This is, to me, journalistic malpractice on its own, but the big thing is without mentioning that an Uber lobbyist is one of Axios's "experts," who on Axios's own website were described as people who (paraphrasing) see stories of interest, flag them, and pass them along to reporters. It's entirely possible that that lobbyist, during a PR nightmare for Uber, got a friendly reporter to write (in an outlet disproportionately read by people responsible for shaping public policy as it relates to companies like Uber!) an article about how Uber was actually good and the people saying it was bad were just a bunch of whiny lefties who don't understand the real world. There's no way to prove that happened, of course, but a quick Google search for "axios uber exclusive" suggests that someone at Uber trusts that Axios isn't going to make them look bad.

The other thing I don't like is that Mike Allen claims to have "no ideology." This, to me, is impossible. Every person, simply by virtue of being a unique human soul with a unique perspective on the world, has an ideology. So either Allen is lying, or he doesn't realize what his ideology is. My guess is it's the latter, but honestly, it doesn't matter. I'm no Althusser scholar, but when people say they have "no ideology," to me that usually means they have no ideological conflicts with the dominant ideology in their society. Someone with "no ideology" in the Soviet Union in 1937 would believe very different things from someone with "no ideology" in the US at that time, for example. Since Mike Allen lives in the U.S. in the post-Reagan era, his "no ideology" ideology is staunchly pro-business, not anti-war, not overtly racist or homophobic, etc. Some parts of it may be good, some bad, but it's an ideology, and attempts to conceal it are, to me, not great journalistic practice.

Finally, as you can probably tell from the fact this post says more than "they suck," I think an essential task of journalism is to convey the nuance in situations that are, you know, nuanced. Axios' bullet-point format is anti-nuance, and thus, a lot of very important information generally gets lost. It's why the president gets one-page briefing reports and communicates primarily through Twitter: brevity makes things appear simpler than they actually are. That's more an issue with Axios' philosophy and less with their ethics, though.

In summary: their information is accurate, but beware of slant and ads disguised as news, and above all, don't let them draw your conclusions for you. They can be believed, but they shouldn't be trusted.

[JimGinPA]

7. Welcome To DU

I look forward to seeing more of your writing.

[procon]

8. Hi, Dan. Thanks for responding to my inquiry and giving me your thoughts on Axios.

I try to be an informed, skeptical and curious consumer of political news; it's hard work! I was alarmed when I saw the right bent groups behind Axios, and read that they were acting as a willing "stenographer" for some really powerful and influential groups. That ethos doesn't speak well of their journalistic integrity.

I read your thought provoking article at Jacobin with relish, finding a kindred spirit, someone who validated my suspicions about Axios. I appreciate your critical insight, and I am somewhat relieved not to be alone in my cynicism. As a wary consumer of news, I'll keep a jaundiced eye on articles from Axios, just as I do with many other news organizations that have made it difficult for me to trust journalism.

Oh, and welcome to DU! I'll be looking forward to reading what you have to say.