On the nature of journalism

I’ve been following and reading Matt Taibbi’s journalism for quite some time. The first reference to an article of his I can find is from Lies, Damned Lies and The Media, in which I cited an article of his called Punish the Right-Wing Liars, published on AlterNet. He’s been on right side of justice for a long time. He’s been chastising the press for lying and forsaking its journalistic duties for just as long.

Whereas he used to hammer exclusively on the more right-wing press during the Bush and Obama years, he’s been forced to take the (supposedly) left-leaning press to task for doing the same.

Most recently, he’s been publishing part of the Twitter Files, which exposes a deep violation of civil liberties on the part of nearly all levels of elected government officials as well as members of agencies ostensibly charged with defending these same rights. The problem he points out is without “sides”, but it’s damning that the Democrats are not only doing it, but denying it, or, when caught red-handed, just don’t seem to care.

I think it’s fine to focus on the party that’s historically taken the moral high ground on first-amendment rights when it’s strayed so far from the path that it’s literally going in the opposite direction. We already know that right-wing politicians and media don’t care about our rights or about telling us the truth or about letting us think what we want.

It’s important to strongly and stridently note that the high-and-mighty self-selected elite are just as bad. That focus doesn’t mean we think the other side has stopped doing it. No, it means that we have a much bigger problem: everyone does it—and no-one seems to care. They don’t even think it’s a problem. They instead choose to attack the messenger and make noise until the problem goes away.

Anyway, here’s Taibbi debating a few points with Brianna Joy Gray. It’s about 30 minutes long.

Is Twitter Only Biased Against the RIGHT? (w/ Matt Taibbi) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

Brianna is asking what sounds like a valid question, but I think Taibbi answered it best at around 15:30, when he asked why she was berating him for not having written the story that wasn’t there. He saw some documents. There may be other documents. The documents he saw tell a story. They are verifiable. That story is true. He’s telling that story.

There may be another story, one possibly hidden by a selective procurement of documents. That is irrelevant to whether the first story is newsworthy. You can’t write a speculative story about whether other documents might exist or whether you’re being manipulated into writing a certain kind of story.

Journalism doesn’t prevent you from writing a true story. It may be that it shifts the balance—because the other story hasn’t been written. But the argument that Gray is making is tantamount to ignoring a murder of a right-wing individual because there might have been murders of left-wing individuals that we don’t know about.

That is, reporting the story we have means that people might draw the conclusion—wholly on their own, based on the absence of reporting on left-wing murders—that only right-wingers are being murdered. That’s not how journalism works. You can’t just sit on a story until you have the whole picture. You have to report on it as it appears. Your only obligation is to determine to the best of your ability whether it’s true—and to drop it if it’s not. (Most of the mainstream media skips that last part.)

If Matt is focusing on the (true) story that’s right in front of his nose, it’s not like he’s ignoring the other story just because he’s not reported it on it in the three months he’s been working on the story. Jesus Christ. He’s not a machine. And he’s not a puppet for people to manipulate into working on the stories they feel are important. He’s the reporter. He’s been selected by a source. That source might close up at any moment.

Taibbi does a pretty bad job of articulating this, but Brianna is certainly showing her lawyerly side by not really giving him any room to breathe and think. It’s fine; it’s her show, but I think it’s taking a long time to get to the point that there’s no obligation to not report a story when you can’t report all of the other potential stories. As noted: that’s not how journalism works.

By the way, I’ve read a bunch of Taibbi’s work on this, and the claim that there was no left-wing suppression comes mostly from others. He says that he hasn’t seen nearly as much suppression of left-wing sources, but I think he means mainstream liberal sources.

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify before CongressIn his testimony to Congress (detailed below), he mentions that there is suppression of true left-wing sources like Consortium News and CounterPunch. Those don’t really count for the argument, though, because both sides are suppressing these. This is not news. Neither side even denies it or tries to hide it. They trumpet their suppression of these sources from the ramparts, in the name of anti-Communism (or whatever).

What is interesting is that outlets like Fox News have seen a lot more suppression that CNN or MSNBC. That’s the point that Taibbi fails to make eloquently enough for people to stop berating him about it.

It’s also kind of obvious that being in the spotlight is extremely uncomfortable for Matt Taibbi. He has to visibly collect himself at a few points.

He very rightly says, “I’m not going to be prioritizing Donald Trump’s stupid requests just because idiots at the New York Times and Washington Post want it.” He’s using his limited time in the treasure trove to find out information about the FBI, the Congress, and the justice department trying to suppress speech at Twitter. Donald Trump trying to cancel another celebrity’s tweet—even though he was president at the time—is utterly irrelevant.

Taibbi is shouting to the world that the FBI is suppressing speech—and providing proof—and the left is doing what the left always does: eating its own. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Matt assumes that people understand how journalism works, while Brianna is describing exactly how useless she would be as a journalist. I’m glad that Taibbi is doing it, and not her. It’s obvious that she doesn’t have any instincts about how to collect information. She’s used to being a lawyer, with infinite time, and infinite resources, and a legal obligation for the opposition to provide information. Journalism doesn’t work like that. Sources dry up. You have to get the good stuff while you can.

At one point she asks why Taibbi’s not interested in left-wing suppression when “85% of historical suppression has been of left-wing groups”. It’s fine to ask that, but Taibbi notes correctly that most of that suppression was not in the area he’s focused on, which is in the last five years. Most of that the historical suppression is from the 1970s, 80s, etc. Much of it is ongoing but, as noted above, no-one on either side of the establishment media cares about that suppression. It’s an important issue, but it’s not the one at hand.

And it’s kind of clear that the U.S. suppresses left-wingers. That’s a soft target journalistically. That’s why there’s no left-wing to speak of in America. Everyone in the media is basically right-wing, even the so-called liberals. So why investigate that further? We already know that the U.S. government has a right-wing bias and actively suppresses left-wing voices. Just try being a communist FFS.

The interesting story here is that the so-called liberals, the Democrats are doing it too and just as much, if not more. And they’re quite thorough about their suppression. This is interesting journalistically because they also take the moral high ground over the right, which has long since admitted that it will suppress whatever the hell it wants.

Taibbi is also one man with limited time. He has chosen his story and it’s an important one. He has verified the information to the best of his ability—he’s done his journalistic due-diligence. It’s up to people to disprove his information, but he’s rightfully not interested in defending himself against ad-hominem attacks or in arguing about other stories he could have worked on while he was getting some sleep, like the lazy fuck that he is. He says this again and again.

It’s evident that he’s overworked as it is, just with the stuff that he’s done. He’s focusing on the government running a subversive program to deprive people of their first-amendment rights. And she’s berating him for not investigating a different story. She seems a bit butt-hurt that he’s not investigating the story that she wants: finding out whether Bernie was torpedoed. I kind of get her point, but she’s absolutely ruthless is not acknowledging that one man can’t report on everything at once. And also we know the Democrats torpedoed Bernie: Biden’s president. Duh.

But, yeah, Taibbi is pretty terrible under pressure. Here he is saying something incredibly important—testifying before Congress—but delivering it in a way that will allow detractors to shred him to pieces, even claiming that he’s deliberately lying—because his body language is so bad.

'Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm Not A So-Called Journalist': Matt Taibbi Discusses The Twitter Files by Matt Taibbi (YouTube)

The transcript is here: My Statement to Congress by Matt Taibbi (Racket News). It’s only a six-minute speech, so watch or read the whole thing, but here are some good excerpts.

“A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.””

“Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.”

“[…] instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.

“Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.”

“Jefferson’s ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy. This is why “anti-disinformation” just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.”

“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”

He followed up this appearance with a post-mortem article called The Democrats Have Lost the Plot by Matt Taibbi (Racket News), in which he had a bit more time to reflect on the experience and discuss what was going through his head. He was largely just flabbergasted and disappointed at the duplicity and stupidity of the Democrats. They were unwilling—or intellectually unable—to grapple with the issue. They seem not to have understood anything at all, even when he laid it out in very simple terms in his introductory speech.

In particular, you can see a video where a Representative Goldman is absolutely badgering and belittling him, about which Taibbi writes:

“A longtime editor once cracked that the Democrats have been stuck since the mid-sixties trying to run Kennedy clones in elections, cranking out one toothy, tallish facsimile after another, from Gary Hart to John Kerry to Beto O’Rourke. Goldman is one of the latest, a literal handsome Dan who’s an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, worth over $250 million, and who opposed Medicare for All and the Green New Deal while marketing himself as “tough on crime.” All of these qualities make him the kind of quintessential born-on-third-base triangulator the party loves.”

“The irony is that what Goldman was doing, confusing accusations with proof — as Thomas Jefferson said, the phenomenon of people whose “suspicions may be evidence” — was the entire reason for the hearing. Michael and I were trying to describe a system that wants to bypass proof and proceed to punishment, a radical idea that this new breed of Democrat embraces. I think they justify this using the Sam Harris argument, that in pursuit of suppressing Trump, anything is justified. But by removing or disrespecting the rights to which Americans are accustomed, you make opposition movements like Trump’s, you don’t stop them.

“Yesterday was memorable for other reasons, but a depressing eye-opener as well, forcing me to see up close the intellectual desert that’s spread all the way to the edges within the party I once supported. There are no more pockets of Wellstones and Kuciniches who were once tolerated and whose job it is to uphold a constitutionalist position within the larger whole. That crucial little pocket of principle is gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.”