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Last April, former Politico CEO Jim VandeHei had a really bad idea. Outlined in a roundly pilloried Wall Street Journal op-ed, VandeHei proposed a new third party called the Innovation Party. His plan, simply put, was to take centrist dogma — means-tested Social Security and Medicare, “muscular” foreign policy — and dress it up in an anti-establishment costume. Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic policies were only popular, VandeHei reasoned, because its spokesperson was “anti-establishment.” If the Innovation Party had its own anti-establishment figurehead, someone willing to “disrupt” the standard political theater — someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg — then that person could easily become president. After all, VandeHei wondered, “who is against innovation?” VandeHei insisted that the Innovation Party’s positions would simply be the best policies, advocated not out of ideology, but out of merit. It just so happened that what the party would promote aligns with what’s best for its rich leaders. Now, VandeHei has launched another bad idea, with a similar premise: Axios, a news site that claims to “provide only content worthy of people’s time, attention, and trust.” That raises one obvious question: who decides what content is worthy? Is it the man who thought up the Innovation Party? Or is it cofounder and executive editor Mike Allen? Allen has a rather checkered past when it comes to journalistic ethics. While at Politico, Allen took payments from businesses in exchange for favorable coverage (i.e. what journalism-school ethics classes would call “the worst thing you can do”). Allen, the Columbia Journalism Review wrote, “obliterated the line between native advertising and journalism.” Perhaps Allen has learned from his mistakes, and he now cares more about reporting the news than peddling access. If so, he should probably peruse his own website. The Axios “about” page includes this pitch to potential advertisers: It’s hard to argue with a straight face that newspaper ads or banners or expensive, glossy native advertising programs are the most effective means for communicating. We developed a lower-cost, more measurable, and adjustable way for advertisers to do native advertising within our platform AND within our content on Facebook. We want to work with advertisers so they feel they get awesome, measurable value — and the respect and return they deserve. It’s true that no one would call banner ads and sponsored content “the most effective means for communicating.” But they do have the virtue of clearly identifying themselves as advertisements. Compare that to the innovative method VandeHei, Allen, and company are pitching: we’ll get your ad inside the content! 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.

The Expert Network Axios’s con goes far deeper than simply disguising corporate PR as journalism; it wants to redefine the very meaning of news until it is fundamentally indistinguishable from PR. It aims to do this through its “expert network,” a pre-approved list of sources that will inject their supposedly unbiased opinions into Axios’s content. A simple search of these experts turns up red flag after red flag. The technology whizzes include Gigi Sohn, whom the Hill describes as having “personal relationships with power players all over the capital, from the Federal Trade Commission to Congress”; Reed Hundt, of the Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit that wants to privatize wind and solar power; Chip Pickering, a socially conservative former congressman who now runs INCOMPAS, a telecommunications lobbying group; Ellen Schrantz, director of the Internet Association, which lobbies on behalf of “internet companies” like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Facebook; and Mindy Finn, a former Lamar Smith staffer who ran for vice president with #NeverTrump conservative Evan McMullin. Axios‘s health care line-up isn’t much better. Besides John McDonough, professor of public health practice at Harvard, the site relies on more lobbyists, like Christopher Condeluci, whose firm represents the “Self-Insurance Industry of America,” and Yvette Fontenot, who meets with Democrats on behalf of Merck, ExxonMobil, and UnitedHealth; more think tank employees, like Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute and Lanhee Chen of the Hoover Institution; more Washington insiders, like Joel Ario, Obama’s former health exchange czar, who now works for a law firm that regularly defends insurance companies; and a handful of businesspeople: Jon Kingsdale of Wakely Consulting, which offers risk-management consulting to health care providers, and Bob Kocher of Venrock — that’s “ven” as in “venture” and “rock” as in Rockefeller — a venture capital firm founded by the oil baron’s family with substantial investments in private health care and pharmaceutical businesses. Of these, only Sohn and McDonough could plausibly be considered bona fide experts. The rest are pro-business shills and right-wing ideologues. Yet Axios has the gall to subtitle one section “Don’t sell BS,” asserting that people want their news with “no bias” and “no nonsense.” “We have one agenda,” the site proudly proclaims, to “help people get smarter, faster.” This is the Innovation Party all over again. “Smart,” like “innovative,” is presented as a value-neutral proposition: everyone wants more smart things! But what actually constitutes “smart” is a deeply ideological question. Martin Shkreli, for instance, would consider hiking medicine for babies unimpeachably “smart.” But someone who needs that medicine to save the life of a loved one — or anyone with a drop of human decency — would consider such a price hike heinous. Looking at the list of people Axios considers “experts,” the business interests it considers “partners,” and the profiteering hack it considers an “editor,” it becomes clear that when it says “smart” or “worthy” it means “business-friendly” and “pro-capitalist.” 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.