All of these trends encouraged the overthrow of postwar liberalism and its journalistic enablers — and favored a return to the blatant partisanship that was once the American norm. Only now, the explicit bias metastasized far beyond broadsheet newspapers to talk radio, cable news, and above all the infinite expanses of the internet.

Viewed against this backdrop, Vox looks like a throwback to the heyday of the unchallenged liberal consensus, when a limited number of news outlets produced content that strove for “just the facts, ma’am” objectivity that just so happened to provide consistent backup for center-left policies.

The contrast with an explicitly liberal policy shop like the Center for American Progress is telling. CAP wears its liberal commitments on its sleeve, and so it’s perfectly at home in the internet’s hyper-partisan ecosystem. But not Vox, which at its best looks like a CAP that’s deep in the throes of an identity crisis. It’s a liberal website that thinks it can get away with pretending not to be a liberal website…

Vox’s string of Panglossian stories looks pretty embarrassing right now. ISIS wasn’t losing three months ago, and it certainly isn’t losing now. That doesn’t mean it’s winning either. But it does mean that the truth is more complicated than Vox has consistently made it seem. Which also means that its “explainers” about ISIS have been more like a disinformation campaign launched by a propaganda ministry than a series of illuminating articles published by a website that’s genuinely devoted to news-gathering and policy analysis.