Matt Taibbi’s bad-faith, dopey media criticisms

Far-right Substack writer Matt Taibbi, who once hosted his Useful Idiots podcast on Rolling Stone until they cut ties after I reported on his false declaration that “there’s a core of emotional truth animating the Qanon conspiracy theory,” has repeatedly leveled disingenuous, incoherent media criticisms.

Downplaying white supremacy to own the media

• Taibbi attacked the media by clownishly claiming on the backchannel: “When Trump won, it became taboo to say anything except that every single Trump voter was a white supremacist.” He also spread the baseless, far-right, anti-Semitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory that “universities are being taken over by these dangerous ideas.”
• In May, on Rising, Taibbi falsely claimed that the media baselessly hyped white supremacy: “White supremacist domestic terrorism has been hyped as the threat and is not commensurate to what the actual problem is.”

Business Insider reported on September 10:

• Current and former officials say that white supremacists and far-right militants pose the biggest danger to the US.
• Experts also say the post-9/11 war on terror directly fueled the resurgence of far-right extremism.
• FBI Director Christopher Wray in March warned senators that domestic extremism was “metastasizing across the country.”

General nonsense criticisms of the press

•Taibbi claimed in an October 7 video on Rising, “A lot of this is about subtext that’s kind of a new consideration in media. We used to not be in the business of worrying about what our audiences did with the information we gave them.”

“Our job ended with let’s just give you what we know and then it’s up to you to do what you want with it,” he continued. “In the last five years there has been this radical revolutionary change in how we do media which is based on the idea that let’s craft the news in a way that we know our audiences are going to respond correctly to the message.”

But in 2017, Taibbi said something entirely different while defending Trump from the disinformation-filled Steele-Dossier published by Buzzfeed: “In America, we have this standard in journalism called the malice standard which is we’re not supposed to publish anything if we have any kind of doubts about the veracity of the material we publish and here we have a news organization openly telling you we have doubts about the documents we published but decide for yourself. I don’t think it’s a good argument to just let people decide for themselves.”

Chapter 2 of the Hutchins Commission Report summarizes the duties of a free press, “Today (1947) our society needs, first, a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning; second, a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism; third, a means of projecting the opinions and attitudes of the groups in the society to one another; fourth, a method of presenting and clarifying the goals and values of the society; and, fifth, a way of reaching every member of the society by the currents of information, thought, and feeling which the press supplies.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Poynter reports that what Jefferson “most wanted was a citizenry that was literate enough to engage with the work of the press, to understand the information delivered by it, and to act accordingly in the public interest.”

•On Rising, in March, Taibbi lavished praise on Trump for working the press: “They’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to make Carlson into a Trump-like figure that they could do daily news about… but these people aren’t Trump. Trump is a unique entity, in terms of his ability to generate eyeballs…”

•Taibbi lied that the media had a sharp tone with Trump, asserting that he was “the most lied about politician,” despite the media’s sordid history of uncritically amplifying Trump’s absurd claims in his live press briefings and tweets for five years.

•Taibbi levied an astoundingly stupid attack on the media for increasing their fact checks, as Trump increased his lies, falsely claiming that “they were wildly expanding the purview of stuff that you could have called a misstatement by Trump.” He leaves out that Trump lied publicly more in his last year to push his election fraud conspiracies.

CLC reported: Former President Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election in a “sacred landslide,” and that the election was “stolen” from him, continues to be a cancer in our body politic — detrimental to our democracy in both the short-term and the long-term.

Trump’s “Stop the Steal” narrative is being used as a justification to roll back access to voting across the nation. And because this false narrative has been repeated so often by Trump and amplified by national news media friendly to him and by his supporters on social media, significant numbers of Trump voters still believe it.

• In another total denial of history, Taibbi falsely claimed that the media supposedly had an anti-Trump tone: “There was an element to the way he was covered that always really bothered me. There was like a glee about it that was just so off-putting.”

Parker Molloy reported, “Many in the media projected their own desire for normalcy onto a Trump avatar. Words like “pivot” were thrown around on such a regular basis that “here comes the pivot” became a joke by the campaign’s end. No pivot came. Then there was speculation that perhaps the presidency itself would inspire a more serious and sober Trump to emerge. That didn’t happen, either. Fast forward five years and journalists and commentators are still talking about imminent pivots and praising him for always-temporary changes in his tone.”

And the right-wing bias in the media is obvious: Reporters are not giving Biden the benefit of the doubt like they did with Trump by obsessing over Biden’s imminent pivots or praising his tone. Broken promises are fiercely remembered and criticized and I think that is good — but the principle is not applied fairly. Trump is repeatedly graded on a curve by the media and Taibbi.

Meanwhile, Taibbi was extremely invested last year in falsely denying that Trump ordered Proud Boys and far-fight extremists to ‘stand by,’ appearing on Iranian state-owned, anti-Semitic Press TV —saying, “I think the story that is being trumpeted in the headlines about Trump encouraging white supremacists is a concocted story and doesn’t fit the transcript of the debate. I mean, I have it right in front of me.”

This is the equivalent of denying that the grass is green and the sky is blue. Read Media Matters’ report: “Proud Boys and far-right figures cheered Trump’s debate call for them to “stand by.”

Downplaying Trump’s white supremacist January 6 insurrection to own the media

• Taibbi repeated Tucker Carlson’s falsehood that the media and Democrats are asking for “vast new powers to prevent January 6th from happening again,” asserting that they are “building this gigantic new machinery that will keep everybody safe,” that will “end in a domestic surveillance state.”

(From the May 19, 2021 edition of Media Matters)

• Downplaying the Capitol insurrection, Matt Taibbi outlandishly alleged that there was a narrative that January 6 was more horrible than 9/11, and falsely claimed that Trump had nothing to do with it: “The fear of being cast in with the evil Trumpists has led to intellectual paralysis.”
• In January, Then-Rising host Krystal Ball interviewed Matt Taibbi, who gave a both sides argument that the media supposedly had blood on their hands for Trump’s insurrection because they created echo chambers.
• Matt Taibbi downplayed Trump’s fascist white supremacist movement despite the former President inciting the January 6 Capitol Putsch: “I thought Trump lacked the discipline, the intellectual consistency, the impulse for political organization, and the ambition to be a fascist”

On October 4, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz reported: “Eastman remained in Trump’s orbit over the next year and a half, according to the Times, and, after Trump lost the 2020 election, the right-wing attorney created a plan by which Vice President Mike Pence and congressional Republicans could use bogus claims of voter fraud to keep Trump in power. Eastman’s six-step scheme to end American democracy, revealed last month by The Washington Post and CNN, was foiled largely because Pence was ultimately unwilling to go through with it.”

Being an anti-anti hydroxychloroquine guy to own the media

Hydroxychloroquine, the deadly, anti-malarial drug touted in pro-Trump media, is causing heart problems in people who falsely believe that it treats COVID-19. The FDA warns against its use for coronavirus, labeling it with a safety warning and has reported on deaths and injuries from taking the drug.

Media Matters reported: Accumulated studies have found hydroxychloroquine is ineffective, and the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and World Health Organization have all issued cautions regarding its use.

• Matt Taibbi complained that hydroxychloroquine was rightly reported as an ineffective treatment for COVID-19, lying that Trump had nothing to do with its promotion. He did. It’s “just a drug. It doesn’t have any political content,” Taibbi said. “It maybe didn’t work, but it was something that had to be investigated on its own merits.”
• Matt Taibbi falsely suggested that the media politicized hydroxychloroquine: “I don’t think it’s the right way to cover the news.”

Taibbi defended Trump’s COVID-19 misinformation on masks, lockdowns, and ventilators to own the media

• Taibbi defended Trump’s COVID-19 misinformation on masks, lockdowns, and ventilators, attacking the media for calling it out: “It’s not a smart way of dealing with things… from a reporter’s perspective, you just can’t do that, you gotta wipe the slate clean on each story.”

Defending anti-vaxxers that are prolonging the pandemic and killing themselves and others to own the media

• Taibbi falsely denied the existence of vaccine hesitancy on the Right, concern-trolling the media for shaming anti-vaxxers.

Defending Alex Jones to own the media

• On the Kremlin propaganda network RT, Taibbi complained that Alex Jones was banned from most of social media. I previously noted that on September 30, a Texas judge found Alex Jones liable in three conspiracy theory lawsuits filed by parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting.