David Marcus:
The emergence of Teen Vogue as a respected news source for people on the Left reads like a movie pitch. After a misogynist bully becomes president, defying the warnings of the established media, a scrappy band of reporters at a magazine for teenage girls takes him on, speaks truth to power, and teaches the media important new values.
The result has been outlets such as Quartz running pieces like “The True Story of How Teen Vogue got mad, got woke, and began terrifying men like Donald Trump.” I can’t claim to be in close communication with men like Donald Trump, but I don’t get the sense that they’re terrified by Teen Vogue, as attractive as that story may be.
It is this narrative, not anything actually reported in Teen Vogue, that has catapulted the outlet into the rarified air of an important, legitimate news outlet, one that will prepare our young women to defend themselves against the coming onslaught of sexism, racism, cisism, and every other ism that Trump will supposedly unleash.
How and why we arrived at a place where Teen Vogue is catching up on the Nation and The New Republic as the gold standard of news from the Left tells us much about how those legacy outlets have faltered. It also suggests that news-people on the Left are moving in a dangerous direction.
Teen Vogue Emerges Post-Election
It started back in early December. The first article that opened people’s eyes to the hard-hitting, activist journalism going on at Teen Vogue was called “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America,” by Lauren Duca. The piece caught my attention then because last year in March here at the Federalist, I wrote a piece called “Lewandowski Case Shows How Donald Trump is Gaslighting America.”
I’m certainly not suggesting anything untoward. Nicole Hemmer wrote an article for U.S. News about Trump gaslighting America that ran two weeks before mine. Since Trump’s victory in the primary there have been a myriad of such articles. It’s a common term, and frankly one that often applies to Trump’s rhetoric.
It was the outsized reaction to the Teen Vogue gaslighting piece that hipped me to the idea that something odd was going on. As I mentioned, many such articles had appeared in prominent publications including The New York Times. So it wasn’t the message here that was new, it was the messenger. What captured the imagination of progressives was the idea that in the wake of the legacy news media’s failure to convince Americans that Trump was a liar they shouldn’t vote for, a magazine for teenage girls was stepping up to show them how it is done.
Articles and tweets from prominent journalists extoling the virtues of the teen zine became, well, all the vogue. The word “courage” kept popping up. If only the news media had shown similar courage, and not been bogged down by pesky things like objectivity, they might have saved America from the disaster they saw in Trump’s election.
Teen Vogue Is Not News
In looking through Teen Vogue’s recent news section, I came upon an article that gives a good example of why progressive journalists feel envy at its work. It has the very newsy title: “Texas Judge Issues Injunction Blocking Obamacare Protections of Transgender People.” Here is how the “news” article ends:
This is all further disturbing when we consider the fact that president-elect Donald Trump has pledged to back the extremely problematic First Amendment Defense Act – a bill that would allow businesses and facilities to deny service to members of the LGBTQ community. The incoming administration has engaged in a lot of anti-LGBTQ discussion and rhetoric, and being as the Obama administration only has 20 days left in office, it is going to become increasingly more important that we stay vigilant and informed to fight against discrimination.
Although the story was published under the heading “news,” it is demonstrably not. Whether one is 16 or 86, this is clearly opinion. It may be a prevailing or popular opinion, but it does not meet the journalistic standards of a news story.
Another viral story from Teen Vogue concerns Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago and the revenue from ticket sales for the event. As Yair Rosenberg points out on Twitter, Teen Vogue didn’t report this story, they aggregated it from Politico.
You realy would think they would read other leftists liberal rags like TIME,ROLLING STONE or USA TODAY or the NYT’s and PEOPLE
amateurs emulate while professional steal in journalism. in 1934-43 the German propaganda machine dedicated a lot of time and energy in recruiting the youth population of Germany, obviously the left are engaging in the same behavior-LN or lefnazism.
Overanalysis. The simple reason Lefties love TV is that your average Democrat these days has the maturity, emotional stability, and intelligence of a teenage girl.