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Notes -
Amazing how consistent the pattern is these days.
Iowahawkblog said it best in 2015
Identify a respected institution.
kill it.
gut it.
wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
Some small news/analysis outlet will find some audience and gain traction for producing quality, mostly unbiased, and interesting/unique content, which forms the reputation on which its' appeal rests.
The outlet hits a critical mass of audience/attention, then some known lefty/prog investors buy out the brand, and in short order remake it into left-leaning opinion mouthpiece #418210, BUT they try to demand everyone treat it as just as reliable and quality as before, and maybe they even make a vague attempt to retain what made it unique in the first place.
In many cases, it dies not long thereafter.
Happened to Axios most recently, also happened to Vice. Also the Onion but I can't count them as a 'reliable' media brand.
FiveThirtyEight ALWAYS had a detectable liberal bias and yet the analysis they did, the actual numbers, at least seemed to reflect underlying reality and they weren't afraid to report conclusions that were disfavorable for Dems. My 'problem' with them was usually their intentional selection of issues to analyze that were pretty much only relevant to left-leaning readers, and the framing of everything as "we all know that [progressive opinion] is the best one, but the polls show that support for it is weaker than we'd like..."
Unless I'm misremembering, Rasmussen was one of the most accurate predictors of the 2020 election results (as reported by The Washington Post no less):
Even FiveThirtyEight itself finds them overall rather accurate. Indeed, seems like their tilt towards the GOP often counteracts whatever factor seems to make certain conservative opinions appear underrepresented.
So it seems absurd to select THAT ONE of all the options to question their reliability and literally threaten with expulsion if they don't explain themselves.
The only thing that could make this situation more farcical as a culture war issue is if the whole point of this move was to drive the value of the Rasmussen brand down so that it can be purchased by lefty/prog investors and they can pull the exact same game by converting Rasmussen itself into a prog mouthpiece.
I actually 100% believe that is at least part of the intent, if they thought they could acquire it and use it to their ends, they already would have.
Anyhow, Conquest's Second Law remains an excellent heuristic.
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