I started getting email news highlights from Axios in Jan. 2019 as less brief than headline news is sometimes of interest. At the time, political bias was not obvious or even detectable, i.e. it looked more ‘fair and balanced’ than Fox News. But things change.
I usually manage to give current events up to a minute of my attention daily by reading headlines (rarely clicking on a link for more).
By 2023 the finely groomed fleece (cut short and dyed a bit grey here and there to resemble natural conservative wolf colors) began to fade. It was occasional word usage (and story selection) that, likely unintended, indicated a left-leaning bias. Good to know. Axios was once ‘center’ rated.
I value right-leaning media for only one service — providing critical information about the Left (the best conservative minds want to know their enemy with maximum clarity). The left-leaning provide a similar service. Their best minds want to accurately diss on the Right.
There is a bias-cancels-bias value. But both sides, along with lesser factions (e.g. Libertarians, Greens), are all within the same thought bubble of metastatic modernity, of zero-order humanism, of the ideology of the necessary primacy of the HUMAN enterprise as variously envisioned/expressed.
For some understanding of the modern techno-industrial enterprise, no one within it is a source of other that what their meme-infested minds think is true and what they think is false in the meme-infested minds of everyone who is infested by different memes.
Back to Axios
So, mostly a just the facts, ma’am offering, but Axios is now firmly committed (since the corporate coup a month ago) to telling you (the left-leaning) the ‘truth’ about the (fascist) Right.
Media Bias/Fact Check needs to move the dot further to the left.
Axios (people behind) were from the Washington Post (bar above), who created Axios to appear least biased (and for four years, they did, but in 2023 their halo began to slip.). They gained credibility. But Trump Inc. has forced their inner wolf to emerge.
This morning my email from Axios included:
2. Inside Trump’s mind
Our popular Axios AM Executive Briefing series on Wednesday will take subscribers behind the scenes of how President Trump thinks, acts and makes big decisions in this new White House.
Why it matters: Axios just poached two of the best-wired [Axios staff] Trump reporters — Marc Caputo and Alex Isenstadt. And Zach Basu, Axios director of news, traveled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week on his first overseas swing. So we have deep reporting and insight to share.
Special guest at Wednesday’s briefing: Caputo!
Bonus: We’re putting the finishing touches on an exhaustive, members-only deep dive Inside MAGA — clinically explaining the players, platforms and priorities. This is essential reading for any CEO, communicator, or leader.
It’ll include an hour-long briefing. Sign up here.
Once Axios had built up a large free subscriber base, they could cash in. The price for an Axios Pro subscription, which allows readers to “go deeper” on topics ranging from media deals to health care policy (worth every penny) is cheap at twice the price. An annual subscription to the Pro newsletter was $599 while an all-access subscription to every Pro product cost $2,499 per year.
Co-founder and president Roy Schwartz said in 2021 that his ultimate outline for Axios was to have the Pro business represent 50% of Axios’ total revenue. In 2022, Axios’ total revenue was just south of $100 million. and the Axios Pros’ contribution was less than 1%. Increasing the subscriber base in 2023 was a necessary step for Pro to close the gap and achieve that 50–50 split with the rest of the business. But AM Executive Briefing (the new newsletter?) and it costs only $1,000 for six months for the straight dope, for left-leaning deepity shit piled high and deep by experts you can believe in.
These people think they know about what is in Trump’s (Musk’s and minion’s) mind. I quite agree that they think they know (but as my white underclass grandmother from Appalachia would note if alive, ‘they [both sides] don’t know shit from apple butter’).
Bonus: If you are a CEO, communicator, or leader, then stand down from your hubris heights (before you fall down) and, like Candide, learn to cultivate your garden (no metaphor implied), i.e. lead humanity by example (and cancel your subscription to Axios, NYT, WSJ, etc.).
“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.” ― Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677 CE
Oh, and learn something too. Then “go forth, under the open sky, and list to Nature’s teachings.”