Matt Taibbi: This Is How To Save Trust In Journalism 54:19

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Well, welcome to the Jason and Alice podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz, and oh, we got a good one today. I think you're really going to enjoy this. You're really going to like this one because we are thrilled to be able to get on the line, Matt Taibbi. Now, some of you are very familiar with Matt. Matt's been a writer for Rolling Stone. He's had some controversial stuff in the past, but boy, his voice and his...

perspective on how the government has treated the first amendment is truly stunning this is guy who's like he's not a republican he's not a conservative he's just an investigative reporter and what i really appreciate about with people is especially mike i don't agree with him on everything but he is out there in his own special talented way calling balls and strikes the way he sees them

And so I'm excited to have this discussion with him because when it came to the Twitter files and everything that was going on there, he was really instrumental in revealing that. And obviously got some insight there with all the background with Elon Musk and what was going on with Twitter. That was pretty amazing. So we're going to have that discussion, talk a little bit about his background, and then we're going to...

You know, do all that. We're going to talk a little bit about the news, and then we're going to talk about the stupid because, well, you know.

There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. So, all right. I mean, they're almost all stupid here. But immigration, immigration, immigration, still at the forefront. I mean, we're struggling to pass pieces of legislation in the United States Congress, not on the House side, but in the Senate side, on the idea that we should deport somebody if they commit a crime with burglary or theft.

Should that person be deported? That's the Lakin-Riley bill that passed out of the House. So the question is, okay, Senate, should we or should we not deport these people? Keep in mind, you're here illegally. You commit a crime, burglary or theft, and the Senate isn't instantaneously saying, yeah, let's bring that up for a vote because, you know what, you should be deported. Now,

Maybe, maybe that passes here, but I record these a few days in advance. Maybe that goes in pass. But why all the hesitation? These people have had to wait for weeks and weeks in order to figure out whether or not this could actually happen. An overwhelmingly important bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives. But, I mean, come on. This is just not happening.

It's just not the way we should be looking at these things. And again, immigration is going to be, I think, the first and foremost in this election. I think that what's going on here is that the election is going to be all about safety and security. Security in your home, security in your wallet, security on the street, security at the border, security overseas.

I really do believe that. That's fundamental to what's going to be happening here in this election. So, all right, time to bring on the stupid because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. ♪

We have to go to the Olympic organizers. You know, coming up this summer in Paris, there's going to be the Olympic Games. People like the Olympic Games. Maybe you don't. Maybe you do. But they just announced, according to FoxNews.com, that organizers are not going to allow athletes participating in the summer games in Paris, which is pretty hot in the summer, will not be staying in air-conditioned buildings.

In the name of climate change and everything else, climate concerns, they're going to house those athletes with no air conditioning. Indoors, in Paris, in the summer. It can get really, really hot.

I think what's going to happen is people are now going to go out and buy all these individual units and then they're going to bring them in and put them in their own rooms. That's what's going to happen. And it's going to be worse for the environment, not actually better for the environment. That's the stupidity that these people are, I mean, this is how they think. And it's just so funny. It's just almost comical. But it's fundamentally wrong in what they're doing. And...

Come on, guys. You can have a little air conditioning for those athletes there at the Olympic Games there in Paris. All right. Time to bring on Matt Taibbi because I'm looking forward to this discussion. Great investigative reporter. Learn a little bit more about his background and then his perspective and get into the Twitter files and what's going on there. So let's give a shout to Matt Taibbi.

Hello. Hey, Matt Taibbi. This is Jason Chaffetz. Hey, Jason. How's it going? Did I pronounce your name properly? Taibbi, right? Is that how you say it? That is how you pronounce it. Yes. Now, that's an interesting name. I don't have a lot of Taibbi's in my neighborhood. Where does that come from?

It's a very rare name. It's Sicilian, but of Arabic descent. And I am neither of those things. I'm actually Irish and Filipino. My father was adopted by a Sicilian family. So that's where that name comes from.

You're more likely to hear it in Lebanon than anywhere else, but it's, but it's not, it's not a common American name. Well, look, I'm a chief. It's living in Utah. So it's rare to none that you get somebody who on the first blush can, you can pronounce it properly on, on, on the first glance. So, um, Hey, listen, you have done some amazing work and, um, it's been fascinating to kind of watch your journey, uh,

I consider you a very serious journalist, somebody who really enjoys and is passionate about diving deep into and learning things and exposing things. But before we kind of get to the end and where you are today, I want to go back to little Matt and growing up and kind of how you got to this spot. So,

I was born in. Let's start there and just kind of walk us through your journey because you've got a fascinating background.

Sure. I was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. My father was a student at Rutgers University at the time. He was actually also a journalist already. He had started working at a newspaper called The Home News in New Brunswick when he was 18. So he was supporting our family that way. Like what kind of news? Just news of the day? News in the neighborhood? What was what was going on there?

He was a general assignment reporter, but he started pretty early doing investigative stuff and was really good at it. And actually, that was the reason we moved out of New Jersey is that he took a job as a

television correspondent when he was very young. I think he was 21 maybe when that happened at a new TV station in Boston. So I moved up to Boston when I was still a baby and that's where I grew up. I spent most of my childhood. Wow. So how long did that last? I mean, did he thrive and continue on and do that for a long time? Oh yeah. My father was in journalism for over 50 years. He ended up

working at NBC Dateline for a long time. He had a number of jobs at NBC. He retired about five, six years ago. He's done work for people all over the world, done war reporting, investigative reporting. A little different for me, though. I mean, as he likes to point out, he's only written one editorial in his entire life. He would

He's more the straight news reporter who's like standing in front of a burning tank as opposed to me. So when you were growing up, do you have brothers, sisters? I did not. No. So you're an only child. You're seeing your dad do this. Like what was, I mean, did you play sports? Were you just a voracious reader? What, I mean, what, what was life like when you were young and in the formative years? Yeah.

Both of those things. My father was actually also a big-time athlete, more than myself. He was a track star, and he played basketball also. So we grew up doing a lot of sports. I played baseball and basketball throughout my childhood. But I also spent a lot of time at the newsroom. You know, it was...

He was a TV reporter at an ABC affiliate in Boston at a time that was very much like the movie Anchorman. A lot of bad facial hair. My father had many jobs. So I grew up in that kind of environment. I was around news from when I was four or five years old.

and never wanted to be a reporter. Actually, I, you know, my father was a very out, um, outgoing extroverted kind of person. I was not that, uh, I wanted to be a writer. I fell in love with books when I was a kid and, uh, it just so happened. I, I ended up in this job because, um, I, um, I turned out to be not so great of a fiction writer. And, uh,

Had to go back on into the family business to support myself. And so this is something I knew how to do, but didn't think I was going to be particularly good at it. So you're going to grade school, then you're in high school, you're playing some sports, you're being an all American kid, I guess, and then decided, hey, I got to get some education, right? Went to college?

Yep. I went off to Bard College. Well, initially I went off to NYU. I transferred to Bard College, which is a little liberal arts school in upstate New York. And then I took a year abroad in what was still the Soviet Union at the time because my favorite writers, believe it or not, were all Russian writers. And I wanted to learn Russian so I could read those books.

So I went off to Russia, learned Russian, came home. And then instead of trying to start a career in the United States, I just went back to Russia and started stringing for various news agencies and eventually got a job at an expat newspaper over there. But that's how I got into journalism.

Um, that's a different route than most people take. It's not like you went out to the Denver post and then decided, Hey, I'm going to transfer over back over to the, uh, tell us about that, that time. So you're in the former Soviet union. I'm reading here that you played a little baseball. Is that right? I did. Yeah. So I, I, um, when I was a kid, I had read a lot of books, uh,

uh, about different kinds of experimental journalism, you know, books like black, like me or paper lion. I was really into the idea of participatory journalism and I wanted to be kind of more of a writer than a reporter. So I, I did a lot of stuff where I would, uh, do some strange experience with the idea of, uh,

reporting on it later. I played for a professional baseball team in Russia. I played basketball. What were they? What were they? What were they called?

There was a team. One team was called Spartak, which is just it's Russian for sort of Spartacus, I guess. Right. And then there was another one, which is CSK. That's the Red Army team. So I played on that team. Actually, they went to the Russian World Series. I didn't actually get into a game in that series, but I was on the team. What position were you playing?

I was a catcher. Very good. Yeah. So I was actually a pretty good catcher, but we had a – that team had three really, really good baseball players on it who actually ended up playing in the minors in the States. And unfortunately, one of them happened to be the catcher. So I didn't get a lot of run on that team. But yeah. And so you played some baseball, but you also played some basketball. I did. I did. So I was –

playing streetball in Moscow at one point. And there's a great court near Moscow State University. If you ever look it up on the internet, you'll see this amazing building. It looks like a giant wedding cake skyscraper. And I was playing out there and there was a Mongolian kid who told me about this thing called the MBA, the Mongolian Basketball Association. The MBA. Yeah.

NBA, yeah. And he said it was the only league in the world that played with NBA rules, had a 24-second shot clock. And I went in to my job the next day. I was working at a newspaper in Moscow and I quit and put all my stuff in a bag, got on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and went to Mongolia and tried out for a team there. Got on the team. Now that had to be a very lucrative contract they dangled in front of you to make that journey, right?

It was, they didn't dangle any contract. In fact, I went out there blind without, without even having a tryout. I just assumed that I was going to make the team. But when I got there, the, the, the deal was hilarious. It was like 150 bucks a month. And I had to do another job working at the state news agency just to have immigration papers. So it was, it was really interesting. Yeah.

I can't imagine. So you played, I guess that's professional baseball and professional basketball. At the lowest conceivable level. At the lowest conceivable. Like how tall are you? I'm six two and a half maybe. Yeah. So the competitors, were they in that range or were you like towering over them at six two?

No, no, no. We had, I mean, the league, I would say, was kind of like Division II-ish for American sports. So, you know, there were some seven-footers in the league. Wow. I was definitely undersized. I was playing kind of more of a, like a small forward role. But, you know, it wasn't bad basketball. We had some decent players, some guys who could have played in the States. Interesting. Yeah.

All right. So you're doing this. You're in your 20s. At what point do you say, all right, time to make another move? And then what move did you make? So...

Very few of the things that happened in my life were the result of conscious planning. What happened with Mongolia, I probably would have stayed there for a long time. I got very, very seriously ill. I had to leave, had to have an operation in the States, came pretty close to dying, lost about 60 pounds. Wow. Yeah, it was pretty bad. And then when I got better, I went back to...

to Russia to start a nightlife guide with some friends that I'd met while I was working in Moscow. So that was the...

That was the beginning of this thing called the exile, which has become kind of an infamous paper. But at the time, there was a big booming expatriate community in Moscow. And, you know, there were only two newspapers. There was us and a straight newspaper. And we became, you know, kind of a sensation in town. It was a lot of fun. It was sort of a cross between Spy Magazine and maybe like...

Screw. I don't know how to put it, but it was a very funny paper. And so somehow you're able to, I guess, have some sort of income from that. So what's the next move on this chess board you're playing on of all these critical moves to get you where you want to go?

Well, we actually did pretty well financially for a while because there was a lot of money in Moscow at that time. And there were a lot of clubs that had no way to reach American clients. So, you know, we were actually doing fine. But there was a lot of pretty intense partying. Eventually, we kind of all went home because we were getting burned out. I went back to the States eventually.

In the second year of Putin's presidency, there were also some things happening in the press landscape that were going to make it tough for us to continue there. So I tried to start a newspaper in Buffalo, New York. That didn't work out. And around that time, I got a call from Rolling Stone asking me to do some campaign reporting. And I

I ended up taking a job there, which I say. Now, that's quite, I mean, how did that happen? Because that's quite a leap. I mean, Rolling Stone's pretty prestigious publication. And to have you writing about politics after playing in the Mongolian Basketball Association, that's quite a leap you took in just a couple of years. How did that come about? Yeah.

It was a real stroke of luck. So, you know, our newspaper in Moscow had been, you know, we had kind of a cult following in Moscow.

sort of all over the place on the internet. And Rolling Stone did a story about us back in, back in the nineties. And the, the editor of, well, actually the executive editor of the magazine, well, Dana had kind of kept tabs on me since that story came out. And when I came back to the States, he gave me a call. You know, Rolling Stone has, has produced a lot of writers over the years and,

Particularly ones who are able to write about politics in the first person with a little bit of a comic voice. It's not a very common combination to find. And so they were looking for somebody to kind of recreate, you know, the P.J. O'Rourke slash Hunter Thompson voice.

It's a very cool gig to be offered. It took a while to settle into, but it's like one of the iconic jobs in American journalism. That was a real Willy Wonka golden ticket kind of a moment. And how long were you there? How long did you do that?

About 15 years, maybe 15, 16 years. Yeah, that's a long time. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. I mean, Rolling Stone at the time, it's changed a lot. But at the time, it was a really, really interesting place to work. They allowed you a lot of leeway to do a lot of really interesting and weird stuff journalistically.

And, you know, I got to cover all kinds of things that, you know, the editors weren't thrilled about, particularly things that, you know, criticized the Obama administration and as well as covering the campaigns. And that was a real fun gig as well. But mostly I did a lot of like investigative stuff on particularly after the 2008 financial collapse. I did a lot of stuff on banking.

Yeah, the subprime mortgage crisis and all that issue. As you've kind of seen it from your own eyes, your own viewpoint, how has the media changed over the last, I don't know, 20, 25 years? Well, I mean, I think as you know, Jason, it's an incredible transformation, right? I mean...

When I came in to journalism, most journalists, I think, had a very similar outlook to what the job was, even no matter what your style was. And I, you know, had obviously a very subjective kind of voice. I was allowed to offer my own opinion. But most reporters, I think if you ask them, didn't view themselves as like activists. They saw themselves as

Being more interested in stories and being kind of finders of fact and getting things right. Like that was the thing that kept us up at night is, you know, are we making a mistake or not? You know, you worried all night long. Did I get something wrong? Did I slander somebody? That kind of stuff.

Now, I think in the age of Trump, you know, there was a big sea change in 2016 and that summer. I mean, I really remember it when suddenly there was this belief that journalists had to change the way they did business. And we had to, as one reporter from the New York Times put it, we had to be true, not just true, but true to history's judgment.

So there was now this emphasis on making sure that readers made correct political decisions and,

And I didn't understand that at all because I saw journalism as being about we get it right, we put it out there, it's up to the public to decide what to do with it. And that's not how people see it anymore. They see there's a very different model. And I didn't fit in it. Neither did a lot of other people. But what happened there? I mean, the prestigious schools of journalism, I just...

They do seem to have just morphed into this advocacy group as opposed to reporting and allowing and entrusting really the readers to come to their own conclusion. It is mystifying how real the Trump derangement syndrome is.

Yeah. And the funny thing about it is that America has such an incredibly rich tradition as a place where, you know, journalism has always there's been a lot of innovation here. We've had, you know, incredible journalists ranging from Mark Twain to Mencken to Ida Tarbell to Terry Southern. I mean, we've done everything from like the most hardcore kinds of investigative reporting to

going undercover to you know

reportage of the temp of the Tom Wolf style. These are, these are a lot of things that Americans kind of invented. This is a genre that we were, we've always been great at. And the one thing that we never did was, well, we haven't done it for a while. Let's put it that way. Like there was a time when politicized news was normal because you would have 40 or 30 or 40 in a big city newspapers. Um,

But now, yeah, now all of a sudden the mission is different. It's like we're not trying to tell you a story in a new and interesting way. We're trying to get you to make the right political decision. And that was never part of the calculation. I mean, I think the American way of looking at things and the reason we have a free press is

Is that, you know, is the whole the whole idea is based on trust. It's like we trust the public when they're better informed to make good decisions and they trust us to do the job. And that's a relationship that I always thought was kind of a beautiful thing. And we don't trust the public anymore. And I just don't understand that that way of looking at the job. You're listening to Jason in the house. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Matt Taibbi right after this.

This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. Talk to me a little bit about the actual publications themselves because, you know, when I grew up,

Um, you know, I, I'm a bit older than you, but when I grew up, you know, we had kind of one or two newspapers in town and then you had the major television networks. And of course you had, you know, these, uh, magazines out there, everything from time and newsweek and Rolling Stone and others that were writing, you know, in really driving the, uh, information cycle, if you will, for, for Americans. But now, uh,

I mean, do you think the social media is a good thing, bad thing? Everybody's a journalist. And how does somebody like yourself break through? And you've done this. I mean, you've published books and other things. Tell people how they can find you and how they can read about you and read your works. But also explain the bigger, broader landscape to us because it's definitely changed. And, you know, my kids in the way they're growing up is a whole lot different than how I grew up.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the biggest difference is that the sheer number of publications and the competitiveness for eyeballs on the Internet means that journalists can't just rely on the prestige of their institutions to project their material to millions of households anymore. Once upon a time,

Journalists didn't have to worry about marketing. They just did their job. You did your two and a half minute piece or whatever and CBS would put it on their broadcast and it would reach however many millions of homes and that was it. You went home at night. Now, because you're competing with not just hundreds of other news services but

you know, Sasquatch sites or porn and God knows what else. Reporters have to market. They have to market constantly. And they're asked to do this by their bosses. And this is one of the big changes that papers like the New York Times, like we're used to not know anything about the people who were the news reporters at the times. They had their bylines, but they were kind of mysterious beyond that. You didn't know what they thought about things. And I think that was kind of a good thing most of the time.

But suddenly in the internet, in the Twitter age, these people had to tweet all the time in order to make sure that people were paying attention and that they were reading their articles. And now there were no secrets. You knew where everybody stood politically, what their opinions were about certain things. And I think that had a bad effect on the media for a while. I mean, ultimately more choice and more channels, uh,

That's always going to be a good thing because there's going to be innovation. There are going to be new outlets. But in the short term, I think what happened is it just turned everybody into an influencer rather than a reporter, right?

And, you know, especially if you worked in an institution that had a particular political slant, you had to be influencing in one way or else you couldn't keep your job. And that's the problem. Is it the fame that's that? I mean, can you not be successful unless you achieve this degree of of fame as opposed to fame?

Or is that just the new requirement that you better be famous because if you don't have famous, you're just not going to have the distribution. You don't have distribution of eyeballs. Sorry, you know, you're just not going to make an income over here. Well, it's an interesting question. I think...

good journalists and especially the ones who get really good stories, they should want to be famous because they should want everybody to see their stuff. So there's always been an aspect of salesmanship to journalism. And sometimes that's about crafting an image, um, you know, of yourself as like a swashbuckling, uh, you,

you know, muckraker, you know, like Cy Hirsch or Bob Woodward or whoever it is. And sometimes that's about, you know, having lots of relationships and appearing on different, lots of different other shows. So that's always been part of the job. The problem is in the internet age, you can't not do it. Right. I mean, you have to do this now in order, in order to even survive, right.

Um, and you know, I think that's had a bad effect because not that doesn't suit everybody, you know, I mean, some people are good at just doing the work, um,

And they're not born to be self-promoters. And that's okay, right? But there's very little room for that in the current media environment. I worry about the suppression. You know, the social media companies, if they were just honest platforms where there was competition in the marketplace, that would be one thing, right? But...

My personal experience is that they suppress and promote based on their personal algorithms and their personal political bent. And you have experience with this. What's your perspective on that? Well, sure. I mean, this was the main thing we found out in the Twitter files was that

you know, this is not just something that happens occasionally. It's a constant feature of all of the internet platforms, which is that they're always tinkering with who is being amplified and who is being de-amplified. And, uh,

you can be deamplified for really stupid reasons like that. You retweeted the wrong site that you, you know, you've been deemed like, like for instance, just to give an example, um,

WikiLeaks was on a what they call a denialist at Twitter that was called is underscore Russian. It was just like a big pile of accounts that, you know, if you hit enough algorithmic metrics,

you fell into a category that was deemed essentially Russian, right? So just by virtue of the fact that certain kinds of people read the site, that they retweeted certain things, they fell into this denialist, and then suddenly their stuff was suppressed. Now, I have some quarrels with the way WikiLeaks does things, but I don't think they should suppress material based on

retweets or what your readers think or any of those things. It should be a free marketplace. And it's not. It's not even anywhere close, actually. How does somebody, you know, a lot of people at home are like, well, you know, I don't care and it doesn't really affect me. But it really does. I mean, if you kind of had to summarize for people, because you did this exceptional work and I was, you know, everybody was kind of

waiting for you to kind of reveal and demonstrate the next thing. I mean, how do you underscore or summarize to somebody the severity of what's happening? Because there are very few social media companies that really do drive the overwhelming number of eyeballs really around the world. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, we were talking before about, you know, the...

The way that the press is structured in this country and kind of the tradition. Well, the whole idea of the free press, the First Amendment, the Fourth Estate, it's predicated on the idea that the press is a independent and sort of be access independent.

a check on, you know, the other institutions in American society. We're supposed to be like the citizens last line of defense. Right. And if we're not independent and if government agencies like the FBI, the DHS, the office of the director of national intelligence can convince what's essentially a cart distribution cartel, right? Like that, no,

this is what people need to understand companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. They're not so much news creators. They're distributors. They're like the, you know, to take, use the old metaphor. It's as if they controlled the trucks that brought the newspapers to each town. Right. Um, and nowadays that's all done through, you know, fiber optics, whatever, uh,

But they were able to dial up or dial down attention to any news story. And the whole – our system does not work if the government has any control over that. And they did. And that's what's so shocking about this is that, you know, as I read the stuff that you were able to expose –

It's amazing to me how well coordinated and tabletop so much of this was with the government embedded with the social media companies. Fair? Absolutely. Embedded with the social media companies and with the journalists from, you know, the big corporate media organizations. I mean, I think one of the most shocking things we found was that

You know, where the minutes for what they call the tabletop exercise at the Aspen Institute, where probably 10 of the country's leading political journalists got together and sort of planned how to not cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. Now, I'm not even a Republican. And I looked at that and thought.

That's crazy. First of all, since when did journalists from competing news organizations get together and war game how to cover or not cover something? We're competitors, right? Like, you know, of course, we always want to drive the story forward, but we don't make off the record deals with intelligence sources and let them dictate to us or tell us how to.

how to or how not to cover something. And then to not reveal that when the story actually came out, that was shocking to me. I mean, again, I grew up in an atmosphere where reporters were supposed to be these prickly, difficult, you know, anti-authoritarian characters who they wouldn't pick up the phone if the FBI called, right? Like the FBI. Right.

The media is, you know, you don't you dare call us. That's this is our turf, right? Like, stay off of it. And the idea of major news organizations like The Washington Post and The New York Times being in bed with intelligence services and in these Internet platforms is

I thought it was crazy. And I was shocked that there wasn't more upheaval and outrage in the business. Well, and I think there was from the public. I mean, I can't point to a specific poll or whatnot, but the distrust and the lack of eyeballs, if you will, from the so-called traditional mainstream media, I mean,

That just goes lower and lower and lower. I mean, people still get information, but it's not from them like it used to be. That's for sure.

Right. And this, I think, reflects a major misunderstanding on the part of the owners of the big media companies on how about how media works. They somehow think that you can mandate trust. Right. You know, I've mentioned a couple of times that Walter Cronkite was twice voted the most trusted person in America. That was like in 72 in 1985. Right.

But that's something that happens. It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen by Fiat or by somebody like excluding other voices. It happens because people tune in day after day for years and years and years and

And they find you to be reliable. Like that's the only way you can build trust. And when you do something to violate that trust, like you tell people that there are WMDs in Iraq when you know that that's not true, that really, really breaks the relationship. And we've done this over and over again in the last 20 years where the big media organizations have –

And they don't seem to understand that this is connected to their loss in audience. It seemed like rocket science to me, but they don't get it. No, it's like that. Was it that German philosopher Nietzsche, right? He said something like, it's not that you lied to me. It's that I can't ever trust you again. And they've kind of lost that trust because they went out and accepted all these awards, you know, on rocket science.

Russia, Russia, Russia and Donald Trump. But then when other facts were illuminated, there was no correction. There was no, hey, this is why and how we got this wrong and how we're going to correct it. It was sort of like, yeah, but, you know, Donald Trump's an idiot and you really shouldn't support him anyway. So we were doing you a service.

Right. And they don't get that people don't really care about that part of it. Like, the funny thing is, like, audiences are very forgiving. They understand. Yeah. Yeah. Make mistakes. Right. So if you make a mistake, they're not, you know, unless it's a deeply dishonest one, they're going to forgive you. But you have to come out and say you have to own it. You have to say, I screwed up and here's how I screwed up.

And that's part of the job. I mean, that's, that's, that's what you have to do when, as an, you know, particularly as an organization, if there's an organizational error, um, uh, this happened to Rolling Stone, uh, when I was, uh, actually it happened when I was briefly not at the magazine, but the, you know, the, the infamous UVA case, uh, you know, I think they did the right thing afterwards. They brought in, uh,

An auditor, they submitted to this huge investigation about what went wrong. They made changes. There are people who are really good editors who lost their careers over this.

Uh, and, but you have to do that if you want your readers to expect that you're not going to make that mistake again. And we're not doing that now. Before I ask you the rapid questions, and I don't care how many dunks you've made in Russia and Mongolia, um, you're not going to be properly prepared for these questions. But, um, before we get to that, foreshadow where we're going, where does this go next? How does it get better? Um,

How does somebody who wants good, honest journalism, you know, what's the public, what's the nation to do in order to get this right? Well, I think, you know, just I have great faith in the American ability to innovate. We've always done that very well, especially in this business, by the way. I mean, not to repeat myself, but we've always come up with new forms of communication and

So we've definitely seen already that there are new types of figures who are out there like, you know, Joe Rogan is an example, right? Who commandeers a huge audience and he does it mainly just by not pretending to be infallible, right? Right, right.

And, you know, this will lead us to, you know, new forms of media that we will again trust. The only thing I worry about, though, is that in this kind of quasi monopolistic situation where there's only a few platforms that distribute all the media, they have the ability to prevent those kinds of issues.

uh, figures from rising. Uh, and that's, that's what I worry about. We've always had like a free market before where, uh, this kind of stuff could come to the top and I'm just not sure that it will. Yeah, no, I think that's a very legitimate, it's huge concern. The other one that I would add to that list personally is, uh, the rise of artificial intelligence and deep fake images, uh, voices, uh, video, uh,

Not just in the political context of elections, but just truth and knowledge and, you know, sexting and all the other nefarious things that can happen when you're able to spoof somebody in such a convincing way. It's just that does scare me that our view of reality is just, you know, I don't want it to be made up in some studio.

you of course not know. And, and you, it's already intensely confusing. You know, it's very, very hard for people to sort out what's true and what's not in the current media landscape, because, you know, as we saw with COVID, for instance, we had the authorities telling us things that were just blatantly untrue and suppressing things that were correct. And, you know, there was additionally social pressure on people who,

To, you know, to repeat certain things and to to constantly say that, you know. Did you ever get that personally? Did you ever feel like somebody call you up and say, hey, Matt, come on, here's what we got to do. Here's the greater good. Oh, yeah. I mean, my life has been I mean, I've lost lots of friends and professional colleagues in the last eight years or so.

over stuff like this you know the this stupid russia story has cost me all kinds of relationships because it just just for saying something simple like hey maybe we should wait until the evidence comes in because we got burned doing this before like with the wmd thing uh there were there was a kind of mass psychosis during that time period that

Um, you know, that led people to, there were, there were lots and lots of, uh, people in the business who were pressuring you to, to say certain things and go along with certain things. And it was not easy for a lot of people to, to resist for sure. That's, uh, I could talk to you for hours and hours about this. Um, how do people find you? Where do we go to read your stuff and, uh, follow you?

Sure. I'm on Substack, which is an independent platform. And the site's just called Racket. It's racket.news. It's very easy to find. And on Twitter, it's at MTAIBI. So M-T-A-I-B-I-B-I. Perfect. Perfect. All right. I got a few. You've been so generous with your time, Matt. I got to ask you a few rapid questions. We do this with everybody just to get to know them a little bit better. So all right. Here we go. Ready? Yeah.

Yeah. Even if you're not. All right. First concert you ever attended. Wow. Thomas Dolby. Thomas Dolby. Yes, that's so embarrassing. Impressive. That's got to be at the top of their resume. It was fun, actually. Yeah, I actually bet it was pretty fun. But yeah, you're dating yourself a little bit. But Thomas Dolby, way to be give a candid answer. I appreciate it. What was your high school? What was your high school mascot?

Uh, we didn't have one actually. Really? My college mascot was the blazer, but I don't even know what that was. Like it didn't have like a physical form or anything like that. It's just a blazer, right? Okay. Uh, what was your first job? Not, Hey, you know, Matt, take out the garbage. I'm saying like from somebody else and your kid, what was the first job where somebody actually paid you money?

A dishwasher and then believe it or not, I worked demolition. Really? Like to blow things up, huh? More like wrecking rooms so that they could be rebuilt. That's fun. Now you use a pen to do that or a typewriter or keyboard, I should say. Probably not a typewriter. Hardcore physical work. It was like construction but for people with no skill. Yes. Okay. Well, if you met Bigfoot, what would you ask him?

I've thought a lot about this and you haven't. So I'm curious as to what your instantaneous response is, because if he's suddenly standing in front of you, what are you going to ask him? He speaks English or am I going to have to learn? I don't think there'll be a language barrier. That's my theory here with my hypothetical. OK. Yeah. Like, do you have an agent? I mean, I think that would be the first thing I would probably ask. Because he needs one. He's missed out on a lot of income.

Exactly. Exactly. He's been an uncredited piece of talent in a lot of production. Yeah, I would want to be able to say, all right, I'm going to show you some pictures and some videos. Is this you? Come on, is this one? Did you really walk across those rocks? Like, yeah, I would love to have that conversation. Is there a Mrs. Bigfoot? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, there would have to be, wouldn't there? See? But I think it would be fun. You're going to go to bed tonight and you're going to be thinking of the 127 questions you actually now want to ask Bigfoot in case that actually happens. So that's one of the consequences of this discussion. All right. What's your superpower? Like, I believe everybody has a superpower. Like, okay, I'm pretty good at this. Like, what's Matt Taibbi's superpower? Yeah.

Um, so I'm only good in life at two things, uh, writing and rebounding a basketball. Really? Yeah. I'm actually probably a better rebounder than a writer. Um, but I had no other skill as a basketball player. So it was kind of strange. Well, good enough to play in the NBA. So that's good. Um, uh, pineapple on pizza. Yes or no.

Yes, definitely. Oh, man, you're on a roll. I had a lot of respect for you, but maybe not so much anymore.

Really? No. You don't approve of the pineapple on pizza? I like pineapple. I like pizza. I don't like pineapple on the pizza. It's just not right. Wow. Yeah. And you say you're from New Brunswick, New Jersey? That doesn't fly. Well, but I have some Polynesian roots, so... Okay. All right. You're pulling out the Polynesian, the Pacific Islander card. I get it. All right. That makes sense. All right.

All right. Very last question. And again, really generous with your time. Best advice you ever got. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was told straight out of college that.

by a journalist that I should get out of the country to start my career because it wouldn't cost as much to live. You'll learn a language and you'll meet really pretty girls and you won't have to worry about supporting yourself as much. And it turned out to be a great thing. I think all journalists actually should start

uh, working overseas. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You know, early in our life, my, my wife, Julie and I, we had two little kids at the time and we had an opportunity to go work in Australia for just a year. It was temporary and, uh, we did it and you know what? We are better for it. And it was a fascinating experience. Yeah. Australia. Yeah.

We were in Sydney. But, you know, I get to travel over. We also had responsibility for New Zealand as well and love it down there. And wonderful people saw and learned. And, you know, it's just kind of that experience of getting out of your own bubble a little bit and becoming a better person and having a wider array of experiences because of it. So it's very similar to what you're talking about. Absolutely. And young in life, you don't have all the...

ties and obligations that maybe you do as you get more entangled in life later on. So it was great. Our kids were young. Our oldest was a first grader. The other one was two years old or something. So it was fun. Yeah, it's really good. That sounds great. Matt Taibbi, thank you so much. The work you do is really important. I don't always agree or

like everything necessarily, but I do have the greatest respect for people who try to get it right and dive in and give us their perspective and give it an honest read and call balls and strikes. You know, that's what you want. You don't want to have an umpire who's like, oh, really? That's a strike for that person, but a ball for somebody else? No, that's not the kind of game I want to watch. So,

I got the greatest respect for somebody who dives in and does that. And I think you've proven that and demonstrated that. So hats off to you. Thank you so much. That's very generous of you to say. And thanks so much for having me on your show. This has been really fun, actually. Thank you. All right. I hope you enjoyed that discussion because Matt's a really smart guy. He sees the world a little bit differently. But that's okay. That's what America is all about. You want to consume what he writes? Go ahead.

If you don't, no, you don't. That's what America is all about. But I appreciate this perspective and his consistency on philosophy and calling something out, even though it's cost him maybe professionally. And that's what I do appreciate him. I hope you can rate this podcast. So if you can subscribe to the podcast, but really rating it, that would be real helpful.

I want to remind listeners you can listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Again, thanks for listening to us. We'll be back next week with a great guest. Join us. I'm Jason Chapitz. This has been Jason in the House.

From the Fox News Podcasts Network, subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy Podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U.S. congressman from South Carolina brings you a one-of-a-kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com.