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"Make sense of the day\u2019s news and ideas," urges The Morning, a daily New York Times newsletter. "Get smarter, faster on news and information that matters to you," Axios assures its readership. "This is how the news should sound," The New York Times again declares, via its podcast The Daily.

Over the last ten years, roughly speaking, we\u2019ve seen the proliferation of the daily digest-style newsletter and podcast at legacy and new media organizations. Inspired, at least loosely, by the so-called explanatory journalism of Vox and similar outlets that arose in the mid-2010s, publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns of the news that allegedly matters most, delivered to the inboxes of upwardly mobile, dinner-party-hosting, perennially on-the-go professionals - or at least those who want to think of themselves as such.

There\u2019s certainly nothing wrong with accessibility in news media\u2014quite the opposite, in fact. But, for corporate \u201cexplanatory\u201d news models, it\u2019s worth asking who makes the decisions about which news is the \u201cmost important,\u201d and about how that news is framed. How do seemingly benign, even folksy promises to \u201cmake sense of the news\u201d mask the ideology of corporate media institutions? And what are the dangers of herding audiences into a center-right political consensus that issues complaints like \u201ccampus speech is vexing\u201d and \u201cthe left is less welcoming than the right\u201d?

On this episode, we examine the rise and hegemony of centrist micro-news platforms\u2013from Axios\u2019s trademarked "Smart Brevity" to The New York Times\u2019 David Leonhardt\u2019s newsletter The Morning and The Daily podcast\u2013looking at how they package left-punching, pathologically incurious, glib news nuggets served up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning liberals.

Our guest is writer Jacob Bacharach.