Matt Taibbi

Boo.

Although it falls fairly squarely in the 'who cares?' box, this has sparked another fairly ugly spat between Intercept and Pando - with Paul Carr publishing his half of an off-the-record e-mail conversation with Taibbi.

The underlying concern is that left-leaning outlets like Vice, Intercept and the hypothetical Racket are being used as a libertarian trojan horse by oligarchs like Omidyar and Murdoch to hold governments to account but stifle coverage of corporate wrongdoing.

yikes!

the whole exiled/pando vs intercept/greenwald thing is so tedious

yeah i have a hard time keeping any of that shit straight even

can someone explain it all via a math equation?

internet old/hard left types really hate molly crabapple too

https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/527456203224649729

i mean, i'm not the biggest fan of her art but you know hmmmmmmm

since when is vice left leaning? Also this CIA conspiracy theory is psychotic

it's really not

I mean I don't know the details but it's not exactly without precedent for the CIA to fund or have clandestine relationships with major media outlets

But yeah as far as "left-leaning" I thought only in the libertarian sense. Socially liberal, against unfree govts or whatever, not a shred of the socialist kind of leftism.

isn't it much much much much more likely that vice is an 'apologist for colonial power' (if it is, whatever) bc of its long known politics and not bc the CIA recruited - of all media outlets - VICE MAGAZINE to spread their propaganda. and to who exactly? brooklyn hipsters?? what a waste of money if true!

also i don't know if you read that full link but i just got up to the point where the author accuses the US of literally (and presumably intentionally, I'm not going to bother reading the Counterpunch lol link it uses as evidence for this claim) arming and financing IS.

The CIA has money to waste. As pointed out, they have a long history of insinuating themselves into the media, including directly funding media outlets, co-opting individual reporters, and planting information and disinformation. They get around.

No, describing Vice as left-leaning was clearly incorrect but there is a sense that a substantial part of the young, politically-aware audience that trusts its news coverage probably skews more to the left than a standard news audience.

For better or for worse Omidyar has documented links to USAID and foreign policy concerns so it's understandable there is reticence about him bankrolling major oppositional news sites, even if it does contradict the narrative that he's using it as a way to limit coverage of corporate wrongdoing and stick it to the state.

Also plenty of allegations flying around that prominent left-leaning journalists have ties to Koch funding, etc. A lot of it seems overblown. I like Ames, Carr is insufferable. The caution about the super rich setting the new media news agenda as well as the old media news agenda seems legit.

i heard the CIA was funding Game Informer and Polygon

I didn't read the Counterpunch link and I rarely put much stock in Counterpunch articles. But Vice isn't some little hipster corner of the indie bookstore's magazine rack anymore, it's huge business.

i know they have an HBO show and they do some good foreign affairs footage as of late imo, but what is the huge business? this is probably just not my world of young ppl i'm imagining bc they seem like smaller than buzzfeed to me.

boo!

however i have faith that ghost rider can still deliver

and srsly doubt that he would be involved if racket was some kind of rightwing trojan horse, come on now

i know they have an HBO show and they do some good foreign affairs footage as of late imo, but what is the huge business? this is probably just not my world of young ppl i'm imagining bc they seem like smaller than buzzfeed to me.

― Mordy, Wednesday, October 29, 2014 2:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's valued at like $2.5 billion and they may do an IPO soon. They're supposed to break $500 million in revenue this year. Rupert Murdoch owns a stake.

Yeah, I'd assume that if the CIA was in the business of influencing news outlets, Vice would be fairly high on the list for the same reason that Murdoch sank $70m into it. Even if it doesn't make any financial sense (and it may not) it's the kind of thing that people think is important in the post-print media landscape, etc.

But all actions we might consider “imperial” are not equal, as Bady argued. When Gadhafi invests in infrastructure in Chad — even though it seems like a dick move to have it bear his name — it is still an anti-imperialist action. When Chávez funds political movements in Bolivia — even though they serve to reinforce his influence on the continent — this is still anti-imperialist action. This is because all of this is done in the face of the biggest imperial force: The West, The Empire. Washington and its closest, most murderous allies such as the UK and France are omnipresent, their roots snaking through the soils and breaking the pavements of almost literally every single country on the face of the earth. The kind of left that equates Russian state funding of RT America with Soros funding of “civil society” organizations in Georgia is not serious about even talking in opposition to the ideology that allows the West to remain astride the world’s peoples.

i admit there was a time in my life that this paragraph would've gotten me really hot

pando is worthless and i occasionally thought nsfwcorp would be less than worthless but it always disappoints

ames has written some first-rate stuff about the history of the nsa and john dolan is consistently great. but i kinda gave up checking back on that site more than once a month because of their obsession with discrediting greenwald and co. feels like a microcosm of the condition of the u.s. left -- two factions who basically agree with each other on almost everything but can't stand each other for reasons so convoluted even regular readers can't understand them. would still take either pando or intercept over counterpunch, which has totally gone off the rails, seems like half the ppl writing for them are militia-nut libertarians.

& pando has Thiel money, is that right? So their position is… 'we take libertarian billionaire money but we're upfront about it, and we're critical of our billionaire sometimes?'

counterpunch still has the most journos i can trust.

ames just seems to overpromise his stunning revelations and rarely pays off, so now i don't feel he's worth the effort.

pando is hardly 'left' in any sense. its a silicon-valley libertarian-leaning insular trade-mag for the startup scene. basically a next gen wall st journal for the sf tech scene.

That Silicon Valley strain of young plutocrats is gonna become its own mini Koch propaganda industry.

Pando hasn't taken any money from Thiel in a while and have said there was always a clear understanding that investment could not buy editorial influence, though they have come down hard on people with more tangential links to billionaires than that.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/30/inside-story-matt-taibbis-departure-first-look-media

^^ what a mess

Yep. It was pretty much sold as a hands-off project for Omidyar at the start but spending a quarter of a billion dollars to let Matt Taibbi write what he wanted never exactly added up.

I applaud the Intercepts transparency about all this, but do wonder if Omidyar won't just pull the plug soon because of all this.

I don't know a lot about the man, but seeing to taxi receipts etc when you injected $ 250 million into a new media company... I don't know. Is he that bored?

who would have guessed that taibbi would be hard to work for, total shock

Here's a relevant blast from the past:

http://observer.com/2000/06/from-russia-with-lust/

letting taibbi write what he wanted is one thing, but -- at least given his public persona -- making him a manager seems like a poor decision by both sides

also, a lede somewhat buried:

These simmering problems came to a head this month when a Racket staffer complained to senior management that Taibbi had been verbally abusive and unprofessionally hostile, and that she felt the conduct may have been motivated, at least in part, by her gender.

No question Taibbi is difficult to work with probably, but the same probably goes for Greenwald and more Intercepters. What I find remarkable is that they use Taibbi's departure to openly criticize Omidyar, and they're not trying to do it subtly either.

I have to say that as much as I love Taibbi's writing, it would not surprise me at all to discover the complaint had merit.

XXp that is indeed somewhat buried

Wonder if Jay Rosen jumped ship at First Look because of this too. He left a couple of weeks ago, supposedly because there was "nothing to do" for him.

The Intercept piece is positioning it as a dispute over corporate culture rather than a far more damaging issue of editorial interference.

well sure but what it doesn't say is that the colleagues that matt was abusing were CIA plants

just skipped to p4reene's endnote

the strange death of liberal bloggers

On a Saturday night in May, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi were drinking Pepsi and smoking American Spirits in a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise near Times Square. They took turns leaning over a plastic compact disc case, snorting lines of speed.

i enjoy reading taibbi but no fucking way would i enjoy working with much less for him

can't tell if this was a d-bag move by Greenwald et. al. putting out all this stuff about Taibbi and making themselves look like the reasonable good kids, or that they knew First Look would leak the accusations against Taibbi and wanted to get in first with a more accurate version of events.

There's going to be an NY Mag 'expose' over the weekend, aiui, and this is getting their side of the story out first.

well hey this has kept taibbi and pareene quiet in the run-up to the 2014 midterms -- good show, pierre!