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Richard Helppie
Hello, and welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Rich Helppie, and very pleased and honored to be here for our 200th episode. The Common Bridge was started because the political parties were focused one hundred percent on their partisan wars - and the former proud for it - the state of journalism had devolved into anger entertainment, and the news reporting environment is not getting any better; ironic in this time of such great unfettered access to original documents where more people are just digesting the narrative driven stories and their own favorite fact checkers. The favorite is the one who dismisses as unimportant those facts that run counter to their own political biases. Of course, if you're thinking right now, yep, that's what the other side does, you're part of the problem. Last week was a great example. I met a woman, a professional with many accomplishments, and she told me this anecdote which I will recapture as close to her original words as I can. She said, I was always blasting the Rush Limbaugh listeners as fools and idiots being led; they were only getting half the story, then I realized that on my daily long drives I was listening exclusively to CNN and perhaps doing exactly the same thing. Then she says she started wondering, what am I not being told? Well, she's now a subscriber to The Common Bridge. We're grateful for that and [she's] a better news consumer too, even more importantly. So today, look at the legacy media. It's focusing on dueling January 6 narratives, the absolute necessity of drag queens in a first grader's education, and of course, the latest in the WWE scripted saga that is the latest trial by media of the heroic or despicable - or heroic and despicable - Donald Trump, in any way. We're all missing very important reporting of things like maybe how proxy wars might help or hurt the United States, what impacts are the deficit and debt going to have on everyone and is it a good idea to set up government agencies to function as the Ministry of Truth, especially during this time when we should be examining how the pandemic policies worked or didn't work? Oh, whoops, that got swallowed up inside the Ministry of Truth too. The goals of The Common Bridge are really simple: bring down the noise, demonstrate that there are good people doing good things - as many of our experts have demonstrated. A goal of The Common Bridge is to provide an alternative to bad online behavior, something where we can discuss versus sling vitriol and most importantly, the goal of The Common Bridge is to inform rather than attempt to incite or influence people. So, we're marking the 200th episode of The Common Bridge by offering a replay of an important episode, Episode 131 from December 4, 2021 where guest, Matt Taibbi, describes the disintegration of American journalism. I think if you listen to this replay, you're going to see how spot on he's been. Good foundational episodes would also include Professor Daniel Crane, describing how fascism is empowered by monopolies; you can find that in Episode 59 from September 6, 2020. And also Mr. Taibbi's first appearance on The Common Bridge in Episode 88, that was on February 6, 2021. He talked about one of his books that day in particular, "Hate Inc.," and it describes how media outlets choose their audience and then feed them anger provoking material that keeps them hyped-up and coming back and making money for places like Fox, MSNBC, CNN, at times the New York Times, and others; the predictable reporting versus the fact-based. I think Mr. Taibbi's actual reporting is even more important now. His actual going to Loudoun County, Virginia was ignored and people still don't understand what actually happened there. He was invited, with other journalists, to investigate what was at Twitter in communications between our government agencies and employees - and particularly its executives - at Twitter. He was given one directive, that is: be truthful. He was not given any compensation. He was not given any restrictions on what he could print as long as it was truthful. There has been opposition to it. There are those who are opposed to his revealing this close communication between our government agencies and powerful social media companies who clearly want to control thought, speech, ideas, facts, and even specific people. They cannot criticize the reporting of Mr. Taibbi and others on the merits, so what do they do? They resort to personal attacks. I encourage you to read this because places like the Global Engagement Center, SISA, the FBI, and others, when they asked Twitter and other social media companies to throttle a message or a person they did it and you see this disease spreading. This morning, in a paper of record, blatant untruths were presented. They were accusing others of disinformation not based on what was in the content, but on who was speaking - so not disputing the facts, but just saying it can't be truth because this is the person saying it. Mr. Taibbi's own writings, which I'll quote here on the anti-speech democratic playbook says "The style of the new anti-speech Democrat is clear: define all government critics as lacking standing to criticize, impugn their prior opinions and associations, imply that all their beliefs are conspiracy theory, define their lack of faith in the FBI's judgment as treasonous, and declare their motivation to be financial. Lastly, when they invoke common Constitutional rights, make a note that their activities exist in an uncovered carve-out of our constitutional protections.” This is coming from a left-leaning journalist with impeccable credentials, but he's been cast out of the circle now for doing factual reporting. Now, if you think that you're safe because you're in alignment with the censors, I think you should consider that further. That works until you utter your first word of unorthodoxy, then you'll be cast out. Troublesome people have been eliminated from multiple platforms. Think you're safe because you aren't on that particular platform? It's easy enough to block your email, ISP or internet carrier. We might have a right to postal mail but I don't know that we have a right to email or even a cell phone. We've seen the notion that some people and some ideas should not be allowed to express themselves or be expressed. Now of course, there are limitations which we won't get into but if you have had thoughts and you've redefined words like "violence" or "harm" to mere words, you're on that slippery slope to repressed speech. Reporting is crucial to our Constitutional Republic form of government. This is our tool for self-governing; it's reporting, not narratives. Keep an open mind; what are the facts versus who is saying it. There is a lot more that unites us than what divides us and that united world is only possible with our freedoms of the First Amendment. So have a listen now to the replay of the second Common Bridge interview with Matt Taibbi. And I thank all my guests, listeners, readers and viewers for their support of the program.
Brian Kruger
Welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm Brian Kruger, the producer of the show. The reason I'm starting this out this time is that Rich has one of his favorite guests on today; Matt Taibbi, former writer for Rolling Stone Magazine, and probably the best, in my opinion, political journalist out there right now. Anyway, we usually start the show and we edit out those guys talking at first. I decided to keep it in this time, because it got kind of fun, as Matt realized that he had some Michigan flair going on. So we joined them in progress.
Matt Taibbi
I just realized I'm wearing Wolverine colors.
Richard Helppie
Yes, thank you, thank you for doing that. And by the way, I've got to tell you that I cracked up...you had in one of your columns recently, you mentioned subjecting the country to the Detroit Lions every Thanksgiving. [Laughter] I don't know if you're aware of this but if you look back in history, the first Thanksgiving actually - it was a little more traditional interpretation - the Native Americans and the Pilgrims all came together and had a feast and then the Lions played the Bears that day, and they lost on a last second field goal. [Laughter].
Matt Taibbi
I would have thought it would have been a last second blocked field goal taken the other way.
Richard Helppie
Right. Exactly. God love them, they're known as the same old lions because they keep doing that kind of thing.
Matt Taibbi
They're amazing. I'm a Patriot fan, so...Tom Brady's first game was against the lions, believe it or not.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, I was in the Big House - not the big house as in the WHO Scout that type of thing - the Big House in Ann Arbor on Saturday, the Wolverines played a really strong game. I mean, Ohio State's a very good team. The Wolverines played well and let's hope that they can keep going against Iowa.
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, I wish you well.
Richard Helppie
Thank you for that, yes, indeed. Okay, good. So I thought we were going, alright. Okay, the topic is not football today, the topic is where are we with the media model. We're in this really strange part of history that we have this administrative state that has a lot of power and lots of edicts and ability to implement things that affect people's lives, although there's really not any legislative recourse to that at all. And then the media models that we've discussed many times on the show, and especially with our guest today, Matt Taibbi, the business models of the global media and internet companies, they're really not out there in a search for truth, but they're really about picking their audience and dividing us. So that's what our topic is today on The Common Bridge with renowned writer, Matt Taibbi, about the state of the world, where the power of the fourth estate has been, where it is today, and maybe a little bit about where it should be headed. So Matt, welcome to The Common Bridge. (Matt Taibbi: Thanks for having me.) I continue to enjoy your books, "The Great Divide" was very, very good. We listened to it on a long drive. Your columns have been going great, Substack is - wow - what you've done with that. Is that the new media model? You've been writing a lot, so what are you been writing about lately?
Matt Taibbi
A bunch of stuff. I'm trying now to...because I started Substack right at the beginning of the pandemic, so a lot of things that I normally would have done in terms of going on the road, like covering the presidential campaign, I didn't have the opportunity to do that. So I'm trying to do a little bit more of that. I went out to Loudoun County, Virginia on election night in Virginia, and I'm working on a traditionally reported story about that whole fiasco now. So it's interesting. One of the things about this new model is it's difficult to replicate the situation that I had at Rolling Stone where they would just tell me go work on something for eight weeks and come back with a story, like, I can't really do that now so I've got to kind of report and in between, that's what I'm trying to figure out.
Richard Helppie
So down there in Loudoun County, what did you discover? According to the corporate media that I've read, it's a hotbed of racists that are attempting to terrorize the school board members in their own community. Were you scared?
Matt Taibbi
This is one of these culture war stories that by the time the national media got a hold of it, it had...it started out as a simple misunderstanding and disagreement and snowballed gradually into this completely irrational, unbridgeable, hostile situation. What actually happened bore no reality whatsoever to what was reported nationally. This whole thing really started - do we have a minute for me to summarize it, because it's so interesting.
Richard Helppie
It's your time, whatever you'd like to chat about, that's what we're here today for.
Matt Taibbi
So what happened was it was a little elementary school in Loudoun County, which is the richest County in America by a fair margin. A little elementary school, they have this thing called Project Based Learning, which is one of these new educational fads where they're trying to get everybody in the school involved in these cross-curricular approaches to teaching. So they were making a plan for Black History Month in 2019 and the fourth grade teachers said, well, we're going to be teaching the Underground Railroad and one of the phys-ed teachers raised his hand and he said, Oh, I've got this great idea, because I went to a training years ago where they did this underground railroad simulation in gym class and we could do that as a supplement to your teaching in fourth grade. And they do it - and this has been done all around the country, not very successfully, there have been many controversies all over the country - but they did the program. And there was a black student in the class who went home, told his or her parents that he had been made to play a slave game. And the parents... (Rich Helppie: Oh, no.) well, I mean, we can understand the reaction of the parent in that situation.
Richard Helppie
Sure, you can understand how the nine year old interpreted what happened in school that day.
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely, absolutely. It all makes perfect sense. But what ended up happening was, rather than doing what you would think would happen, which would be a meeting between the parents and the school, an apology - maybe - and if things went badly, some sensitivity training, something like that. What this actually turned into was, there had been a long simmering disagreement about much bigger issues at the school, specifically about admissions to the gifted program and about disciplinary procedures. So the local NAACP was upset that there were statistical inequities in admissions to this gifted schools program and they were about to file a long complaint against the schools. Essentially, this incident was used to create a media furor that there was an outbreak of racism in the school system that was then used to try to push changes in the gifted program admission system to de-emphasize test scores. So there's a whole lot of stuff there to chew on but basically, this comes down to kind of a weighty philosophical question over like, how do you achieve - if you have an ethnic group that's lagging behind in admissions to a gifted program - how do you achieve that? Do you just numerically make it happen? Do you instill quotas? Do you do nothing? Because if you do quotas, then say, the South Asian and Asian kids were doing well, they're going to now not be in as much. But rather than present it as a serious issue that could have been thought out and discussed, it was presented to the media as this outbreak of insane racism and people not wanting their kids to learn about slavery, which is totally not what happened. So it turned into something way more divisive than it needed to be. I'm sorry I went on about this, but it's very frustrating.
Richard Helppie
What's really fascinating about this is that I mean, look, the right answer would be, what do we need to do so that all the kids can come up to speed academically to gain their math skills and their reading skills and so forth? And if they maybe were less advantaged, let's give them some extra attention right now so that they can get to that level. I've seen very successful programs along with that. But the really fascinating part about this and an area that I consider you to be one of the leading thought leaders in is about the way the media portrayed it. (Matt Taibbi: Exactly.) You were there on the ground as a trained reporter with decades of experience and the way I'm understanding the story is nothing like the "we need to have Merrick Garland threaten terrorism prosecutions, because these parents are doing something so horrible."
Matt Taibbi
It really bears no resemblance to that story at all. I think what happens is reporters, especially national reporters, if you can't go there you're really reliant on what somebody else has written. And if the initial report in the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever, says something along the lines of parents were resistant to the teaching about our country's history, that's framing it one way. Another way to put it, what actually happened was the school was trying to teach the Underground Railroad story, did it in kind of a ham-handed way and this led into a hornet's nest of other issues that are really super complicated and hard to sort out. But that's not an easy headline and what's infuriating is the willingness of national media to just go grab the third rail and take a story that didn't need to be divisive and polarizing and they made it as polarizing as they possibly could make it.
Richard Helppie
Well, you talked about that in your book, "Hate Inc." and you talked about that very phenomena on my show when you were with us before; that the media outlets pick their audience, they want to cheer for their team, and they're really disregarding reporting and the facts that are on the ground. Instead saying, I'm going to seize this and we're going to call this racism and those rubes down in Virginia don't want to teach a full American history. That's what they reported.
Matt Taibbi
Right, and they do that...I call it the audience optimization model. Essentially they're picking who the audience is and then they're crafting a narrative that they know is going to succeed with that audience. And that allows you to do...as an entertainment model, it works; as a business model, it works. It's terrible as a press model, because essentially what you're doing is you're pre-writing your takes on almost everything. You go into almost any situation and as a reporter, you can go to a place like Loudoun County and look for the quotes that you want that are going to support the thesis you've already written in your head, if you want to do it that way. The way you should do it is you go with an open mind and just tell people what you actually saw. But no, they're just playing to audiences now. It's so much more transparent than it used to be, it was so much more transparent than when I wrote "Hate Inc." and that was only a few years ago.
Richard Helppie
Again, this is my personal take on this so bear with me as someone who is not a professional in this, but you've got this new media model, and the new media model is pick your audience, feed them things that get them angry, outraged, get them to demean the other side, get them to believe the other side is stupid, that they're taking horse de-wormer or they're undermining the Republic with their communist ties - depending on what narrative you want. At the same time, I may be a perpetual optimist, people are starting to go, you know what, we know that when we look at these corporate news groups, we know we're being lied to. It seems that there are people that are saying, you know what, I'm going to pick my own brand allies, versus you know what, give me something that's not lying. And maybe just to get to the point of this, that's maybe why Substack is being so successful today. You guys are actually reporting out there.
Matt Taibbi
I think it's when the audience knows in advance what you're going to say, they find that boring even if they're being openly manipulated, even if what they're being told coincides with what their belief system might tell them that they would like. Eventually, they start to tune that outlet out because they know that it's just the come-on. It's basically a commercial. If you're turning on Fox or MSNBC one hundred percent of the time you can guess what their read on a situation is going to be; that tells you an awful lot about the thinking - or the level of thinking or lack thereof - at that news outlet. I think Substack has been successful in large purchase because it's unpredictable. You don't always know a hundred percent of the time what people are going to say. There are a lot of different voices, some of them are more predictable than others but at least there's a little bit of variability which to audiences, suggests even on a superficial level, that there's some thought that's going into what they're reading.
Richard Helppie
So you're doing reporting and you are unpredictable - which I think is what reporting is supposed to be - as well as many of your other writers. But you've drawn some heat for that. People are like, hey, what happened to Matt Taibbi? Like, what? Who's he reporting for? Is he a liberal? Is he a conservative? Is he something else? We don't know what to do with this guy. Am I getting that right, first of all, and isn't that a little weird?
Matt Taibbi
No, it's totally predictable. Look, it's a disciplinary mechanism, these "what happened to X" stories. The king of these, obviously, is Glenn Greenwald, he's had about 15 of them written about him. The whole idea is to send a message to everybody else in the business that anybody who voluntarily leaves the Eden of mainstream media recognition, not only are you going to no longer be plugged into all the easy avenues of money making, like speaking fees, book deals, there's lots of ancillary income streams that they kind of threaten you with if you deviate from the norm, but also there's going to be like a public shaming thing that goes on. In Greenwald's case it was so egregious. The New York Times did a story called "The Bane of Their Resistance" - I'm sorry, it was the New Yorker - and Greenwald, the essence of that story was that he had dissented on the Russia-gate story because...and they interviewed all these former co-workers and friends of Glenn's, who basically said things like, he has daddy issues, he grew up confused because he's gay. One of his former editors said that he has trouble with the direction that the Democratic Party is going in with [its] increased involvement with women and minorities. So they're saying because you disagree with us intellectually about this thing there's something pathologically wrong with you, you're a racist, whatever. And people see that and they say, I don't want to deal with that, and they won't step out of line. So I did get a story written about me in New York, but the reporter, this guy, Ross Barkan, he's a very good reporter and he actually did, I think, a very fair job with me, but people still see that and what they'll see is, this is what's going to happen to me if I kind of step out a line a little bit.
Richard Helppie
The thing that's astonishing with that is that people don't think...because they go to a place like CNN, okay, and these rocket scientists over there couldn't find a scandal in their own building where one of their anchors was tipping off his brother. And of course, they're trying to cover the deaths in the nursing homes with the sex scandals, and doing pretty fair job of it because people have kind of forgotten. I'm a healthcare guy so I follow that a little bit more closely about pandemic response and data and that type of thing. It's like, do people not even see this? It's like, here's CNN, supposedly reporting the news and here's a story in your building and then you go, well, wait, they're the same guys whose legal analyst masturbated on a Zoom call and he's back on the air.
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, that was quick. It's amazing and it's also strange. It's kind of a new phenomenon, too, because not that long ago we really celebrated it in the news media when somebody was an independent thinker who kind of went against the grain, that kind of personality was really encouraged. If you think about somebody like Sy Hersh, right? The notion of being the courageous one who goes against everybody else's instincts and sticks with a story no matter what. That's also the legend of Watergate, frankly, right? Like the The Washington Post was the only paper that really stuck with that, nobody else believed it. Even early in my career I've always gone after both sides. This is not a new thing for me, like criticizing the Democrats, I was pretty complimentary about Barack Obama when he ran for president. But then, a year later, when I had to cover his response to the financial crisis, I wrote really long and pretty blistering pieces about him. And they were praised by people in the business because back then it was considered a sign of intellectual independence to do that. Now there's this monoculture that doesn't tolerate that sort of thing. They don't want you to think independently. They want you to think as a group. That's different and it's totally unsustainable as a way to do media or to do the news, anyway.
Richard Helppie
Well, it's unsustainable in a free society. I know you've had experience living in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia and you've written about that as well, which I find fascinating as you do those side by sides. But when I think about this group think or write think...it's a time now when we have this bias that's put out by those that are elected or those that are in government bureaucracies. It gets picked up without question, relayed, amplified, and then what should be the liberating technologies to let us all communicate, they've now gone overboard with censorship. I really fear what's going on at Twitter right now. I mean, that was kind of one place...and now well, you can't put a photo up unless somebody's approved it. (Matt Taibbi: Right.) And their definitions are so broad, you can kind of see what's going to happen here.
Matt Taibbi
I just wrote about this, too, this story of the internet going from being a place that had promise as sort of the ultimate democratizing and leveling tool, to being an instrument of social control. I think it's one of the biggest stories of our time. I would argue that it's probably the biggest story of our time, (Rich Helppie: I agree.) because it's a political story. At the core level, this is about deciding who gets to see what, who gets to talk about what, who has the power to shape the issues that we debate. The great thing about the internet previously was that it was a tremendous check on the kind of gate-keeping mechanism of corporate media, because there was no way to suppress a story, there was no way to prevent something that was true and interesting from getting out. You think about that; when Dan Rather screwed up that story about George Bush it was a tiny blogger who broke that story initially. That would never have happened previously, you would never have seen somebody who didn't have a voice on one of the big networks exploding a figure of that magnitude, of that level of prominence. Now, I think that the powers that be have figured out that this is untenable for them; they can't afford to have this kind of a free dialogue, a challenge to the system, and they're turning these platforms into the same kind of gate-keeping mechanism that I saw in campaign reporters for years, sort of getting together and deciding what is and is not acceptable coverage for people. I think it's terrifying.
Richard Helppie
Well I think it's beyond terrifying. I think we are very close to eliminating any kind of a thoughtful process, be it in a courtroom or be it in follow-up reporting. Think about the division over Kenosha, Wisconsin. The headline was "white officer shoots unarmed black man in the back seven times." That was the story. There was no - and again, I'm not going to comment on the officer's conduct. I guess I would point out that it was investigated from the civil rights department and he was investigated by state authorities. It was, what was the man that was shot? Why were the police there in the first place? He was violating a personal protection order. He had assaulted the woman who made the call, he had stolen her car, he had her kids in the car, he fought the police, he was impervious to the taser and he's now reaching under the seat for something that turned out to be a knife and there's the officer. Everything else had been tried. I mean, I wish they had something else they could use. But faced with that incident do I let this guy drive off in a high speed chase with three kids in the car or do I stop it now? All led up to that. Of course with the city already in flames we have more tragedy on tragedy. Then the resulting court case was decided in the media on basically non-facts - what do you call non-facts, I guess they're lies? (Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I guess.) That's my concern, Matt, is that so many people under so many stories have convicted someone on the first accusation before any further facts can be investigated and before any court. That's what I think is dangerous.
Matt Taibbi
Look, there are lots of different ways to look at the Jacob Lake situation, you're right. The two government authorities [who] investigated that found they had insufficient...found that they probably wouldn't be successful in a prosecution for a variety of reasons. If you ask people in other countries who have different policing methods what their take on this would be, they would probably say America has too many shooting deaths involving police. But that's not because of what this individual officer did, it's because we just have a different way of doing policing in this country. Traditionally, the role of the media is we try to get things as right as we can in the first moments, and then we'll use the time afterwards to get ourselves closer to the truth. What happens now is we settle in on a narrative immediately and then it's like the Alamo after that; they're just defending the narrative going forward. And so a situation like what happened in Kenosha, yes, that you had to caricature in the first blush but rather than go away from the caricature and tell the people about all the facts on both sides that might make you think a little bit differently about things - like in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. I don't love it as a parent, I wouldn't want my 17 year old picking up a rifle and going into a situation like that. But that's different from the issue of, is he going to have a robust defense legally in this state, given that situation, given all the evidence that came out. It's not our job to characterize people and then get you worked up about it. It's our job to kind of dispassionately, almost not caring, tell you what happened, and then give you more information as it becomes available. And that's not what we're doing. We're building narratives and then just feeding them day after day after day.
Richard Helppie
Exactly. We had a fellow, an author and educator, a couple of episodes ago, by the name of Eric Bean, who wrote a book called "Bias is All Around You." He went through step by step about how to - by the way, it's like a one hundred page book and then he's got worksheets - how you can spot bias: who's doing it, where is it coming from, what are the techniques. We didn't get too deep into any of the techniques, but again, I'd recommend the book. One of the things - as a pattern recognizer, a programmer guy - usually once a public accusation is made, that's kind of the pinnacle and that's where the story dies. Then when more facts come out, it's just why don't we just move on to the next thing. We've got some interesting things in the news right now, I mean, Jussie Smollett trial started, Ghislaine Maxwell's in court, we have the Waukesha situation, we have the border...[cross talk, inaudible] yes, right, the Waukesha is pretty horrible. And here in Oxford, Michigan - which actually the reporting has not been bad about that one and it'll be interesting to see as that develops - horrible tragedy, and then about the lock-downs that are going around the world, the protests, and then what we're doing with our border. It's a long list of things in the news. I don't know if any of those have piqued your interest and what you're thinking about following up on.
Matt Taibbi
I watch all that stuff just from a media aspect, I was kind of interested in the lack of interest in the Waukesha story, it seems like it happened and then all sudden, the national media just decided it wasn't something they were going to focus on and they moved on to something else. I think there are a lot of questions about that, like, what was the motive there, do we know? There a lack of curiosity about that and that, I think, that's a pattern that I've noticed with this new version of the news media that's different from what we used to have. For instance, a big red flag for me initially with the Russia-gate story was the disinterest among my colleagues in the origin story of all this, like, how did the investigation start? What was the thing that prompted it? We were already well into acts two, three and four of this drama and almost nobody was really interested in where did this begin. When did the authority start digging into this thing? That's, again, that's totally new, the old school reporters wouldn't have cared so much about what the impact of the story was, it would just bother them on almost a physiological level like, I'm just missing elements of the story, I don't know what this is and that upsets me. But they don't...we just don't think like that anymore in the press now, which is odd. I don't really know how to explain it.
Richard Helppie
Well, that's something that troubled me deeply too. If you said, this story doesn't really hold together; there's a guy in his 70's, been in the public eye pretty much his entire adult life, decided he wanted to be president and said, you know what, Russians are the way to go. I'm like, okay, that could be true, let's investigate it. And it turned out that the whole story was garbage. I didn't think Trump was a good president. I mean, I just had this vision of him in the Oval Office just running from pillar to post and bouncing off things and slugging Diet Cokes down. But that's easy for me to say look, I don't think Trump was a great choice for president, I don't think he was a great person to be a president, and also say that the Russian reporting was garbage. And now, the guy that was at the center of this, a guy named Marc Elias, has got 50 lawyers that he's running lawsuits about voting rights and I've read some of the legislation. I've had a professor from University of Iowa, Derek Muller, on talking about what's in the voting laws. Nobody's asking the question, where did Elias get the money to hire 50 lawyers and file hundreds of lawsuits?
Matt Taibbi
Right. Who is the client.
Richard Helppie
Right. I mean, if they published his rate, it just went up to $1,190 an hour. You can watch the guy hustling; I follow him on social media, he's getting people to register. By the way, he is using Trump techniques to make money for Mark Elias.
Matt Taibbi
Okay. Yeah, I know, and we're talking about the guy who was the general counsel of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. And yeah, where's the curiosity about stuff like that? With that same figure, he was obviously the person who commissioned the Steele Dossier and he was the person who paid for it. For an entire year after that thing came out the question of who financed it somehow eluded the entire national press corps. And we would never have found out were it not for a very strange and, by the way, temporary quirk in the House rules that allowed the Republicans on the Intelligence Committee to subpoena those records. If they had been in the minority, we would still not know that the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele Dossier, which, again, is an amazing thing. Think about how many news stories were generated by that and how incurious you have to be to not ask who paid for this thing. Afterwards - especially if you're the one who's writing these stories - it's just a safety procedure. I mean, as a reporter, you're always terrified that something that you write is going to backup on you and turn into a lawsuit. The idea that you would publish something and not know who was behind it, or who was paying for it; it's like unsafe sex - on that level. [Laughter.]
Richard Helppie
I think that would make me nervous as a reporter; is this right. But I think worse is when you know what you're writing is wrong. Newsweek tried to cover for Rachel Maddow, they had two attorneys - Barbara McQuade is an MSNBC legal analyst and another woman - they wrote this story in Newsweek and I read it and I actually wrote a response to it. I put on my website, RichardHelppie.com, called it "The Russian Investigation Takes the Smollett Approach" because in their cover story they said, well, Steele was hired by Republicans and then later by Democrats. It's like, no, no, no, the Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS, they were out of the picture in the early primaries after it was apparent Trump was going to get the nomination, - I know you know this story - and then the DNC - through Perkins Coie, their legal counsel - hired Fusion GPS, then hired Steele. I know they knew that was a lie when they wrote it. I kind of took their article down piece by piece, including that they made statements like, all these people that didn't prove that Trump colluded must be lying but Mueller let them go. Right? Like, he got George Papadopolis but the other ones he said, no, I'm good here.
Matt Taibbi
It's amazing. The idea that you would publish something knowing that it's wrong is, again, for people in my generation and older we all remember the days of when you read your story, you didn't sleep that night, because you were terrified that somebody was going to look at it the next morning and find the thing that you screwed up and that might mean your career. I think most news reporters who cut their teeth before this last decade or so, we remember that thing. But this really began with the Russia story. Remember when BuzzFeed printed the Steele Dossier they had this disclaimer on the top that says, not only can we not verify this stuff, but we can actually tell you that there are errors in it that we've already found. But we're going to put this out there anyway, because we're going to let the public decide. Now that's one level of...that's not even dishonesty, that's a position that they're taking. But the next level is what most of the reporters did, which is they knew that they were running dicey material, or they knew they were only getting one side of the story from their mostly anonymous sources and they ran it anyway because they were in on it. There's like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, sort of relationship. And the thing that we can compare this to is like the thing that happens on Wall Street where a short seller will want to knock down a company and what they'll do is they'll commission an investment bank to do a report about that company and it'll be very, very negative. They'll show the report to a reporter, then they'll also take the report to the SEC or to the FBI. Now, the reporter knows that he or she does not have a story unless the FBI or the SEC takes hold of the report. The instant they do, he or she can write a headline "this company is being investigated," but they're not evaluating the company on the merits, they're just looking at whether or not they have technically a way to do the story. And that's a lot of what happened with the Russia-gate story. A lot of these people knew that the information was totally dubious, but they were just waiting for a technical out that allowed them to put it out there. What you described with Newsweek is even a level beyond that, because that's just factually flat-out wrong.
Richard Helppie
That happened this year. (Matt Taibbi: Yes.) This is not an ancient history, this is all out now and they wrote the cover.
Matt Taibbi
Right. I mean, that started because the AP got it wrong initially and AP corrected it within a couple of hours. But that legend continues to survive because of stuff like that and it's incredibly frustrating. Again, it's just more of the attitude; it used to be a point of pride to not let that happen to you. And now...
Richard Helppie
As I'm listening to you explain this inside of reporting and the fear of getting it wrong, it just seems to me that the fear is hey, the people on my side of the ledger aren't going to like this; I've got to shape this and shade this and look the other way. I mean, the whole thing...the media should have had a comeuppance and said, you know what, we really failed here. So far one person from the corporate media, Terry Moran, said we're going to really have some people to answer to. There's been no accountability.
Matt Taibbi
A few others, Barry Meier wrote a book about Fusion GPS that I think probably rubbed some people at his paper, The New York Times, the wrong way. But no, you're absolutely right. That idea oh, I'm so afraid that people in my set aren't going to like me anymore. Think about the change in mentality; reporters used to pride themselves on how tough they were, like we were the guys who would go charging out and stand in front of a burning tank and we would fight through the crowds, we weren't afraid of anything. We were especially not afraid to piss people off. That was supposed to be a part of the job requirement, that you had to have that kind of personality. (Rich Helppie: Absolutely.) Now, we're actively recruiting people who have the opposite instinct, who, it's like that thing where when 50% of the deer decide to run one way, they all go. Those are the kind of people that we're looking for in media now, which is just unusual to see it. It's a big change.
Richard Helppie
It is and I think that it translates over to what we've seen in social media, Facebook, and I followed that story. And again, I've written and talked about the power of tech monopolies and how they can non-person someone, and not one person in the media called out when Facebook was testifying, they were saying, hey, we don't make the rules. It was kind of like, regulate me before I harm again. All they really want is a franchise to keep their business going and they will censor anybody as long as they get to keep doing that. That's what I think is happening with Twitter with the change in leadership.
Matt Taibbi
Definitely. And as regards to change in leadership I can tell you, Jack Dorsey, he's got a lot of critics but he did call a lot of journalists, including me, for basically just sort of advice on - not even advice - as a sounding board, what would be the speech implications if we did this, this and this (Rich Helppie: Oh, nice.) which was very, very unusual, right? Normally, companies do not care what anybody thinks. I think this person actually has a conscience and agonized over some of these things and now he's gone. You saw what happened right away, they made a very, very limited sweeping decision that is going to basically turn Twitter into something that's algorithmic; censorship on steroids. If you talk to people in Silicon Valley they'll tell you that most people don't have a sense of the scale of how big these platforms are. I mean, it's just not logistically possible to fairly do any kind of content moderation once you start talking about factuality; it's going to be weighted in one direction or another, it has to be done by machine and machines can't do this stuff.
Richard Helppie
If people would use diligence. So by way of example, I saw stories and saw video of the lock-down protests in France and elsewhere in Europe, and then Australia's got these quarantine camps. And I'm like, okay, I don't think I believe that. So I go and I use my search engine and I try to find that; can't find anything on it. So I use my VPN to go access an Australian ISP and then I do a search and now I start picking it up and whoa, they do have quarantine camps. They are holding aborigines and they're holding people that arrive in the country; Australians and non-Australians. They've also restricted travel amongst their states over there. I can't understand why this isn't a news story. Is it a good public policy? First of all, it's a stupid public health policy but it should be reported. If you're proud of what you're doing, you should say, yeah, this is what we're doing because we think it makes sense.
Matt Taibbi
That phenomenon of not being able to find the material even though you're specifically searching for it, that's a freaky new thing that nobody seems to be complaining about enough. For instance, I forget who it was recently, it might have been the Lauren Boeburt thing, she gives this speech and it's offensive and everybody's upset about it. I wanted to see the original video...oh no, it wasn't that, it was Paul Gosar's video about AOC. Remember the end, there was a whole brouhaha about how it was threatening and all that and I just wanted to see what the video looked like, I didn't have any feelings about it one way or the other. But the first three or four pages of results when you went to search for it were stories contextualizing it for you. You can't find the root material because they want you to see what the prevailing opinion is long before you get to actually what the thing is. That's really upsetting because people need to be able to have at least access to the root material.
Richard Helppie
I've heard the people that are the talking heads and the reporters who used to be the print media saying, hey, Matt Taibbi's got more followers on Substack than watch our program at night. It reminds me of the 1980 American car companies. They're like, hey, the Japanese are stealing our customers, right? Like, you quit delivering a product people wanted to buy...So talk to us, as we wrap up here, about where you think we are on a new media model. Can we focus on issues of ordinary people versus those inside the beltway? Where are we with that? And just for the benefit of our readers, what can the average person do to be a better media consumer?
Matt Taibbi
Well, I think we're in an interesting place, you find that there's...whether it's Joe Rogan, who has many times more viewers than either Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson, or it's Substack, which is doing extremely well, it's making money, which is unusual. The problem that I see though, is that even though these big audiences are sustaining these independent media areas, there isn't yet an institutional mechanism for hardcore investigative reporting. We haven't figured out a way to pay for that yet. We've been able to pay for podcasts, we've been able to pay for op-ed writing but that thing still isn't there. As for advice, I would just say news is an individualized experience, try to find the core material, you should be able to find the source material. That's one of the the great benefits of the internet is that you can find the congressional report, you can find whatever the source document is; in as many cases you can, start with that. Also make an effort to read both the media you like and the media you dislike because the algorithm is designed to keep you in a pen, sort of surrounded by your own desires. It doesn't want you to go outside of that and that's you have to fight against.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with reporter, author, columnist, Matt Taibbi. I highly recommend his books, his column. Please follow him on Substack. Matt, you've been super generous with your time today, we really appreciate it, hope that we get to have this conversation again.
Matt Taibbi
Thanks so much, Richard. Take care.
(Watch, Listen or Read) The Disintegration of American Journalism