Matt Taibbi

After a person has endorsed enough irresponsibly stupid opinions in public, it's OK to regard their judgment as hopelessly flawed to the point where even when they are 'right' it is clearly the result of an accident, not intrinsic ability.

Hm Aimless is right in this case but he’s posted some stupid opinions before so I’m not sure how to judge this one

regard me however you think best, silby.

Do you think they're really invested in free speech in a meaningful sense?

Just taking a quick look at the Cases section of their website, I personally get the impression they're invested in free speech in a meaningful sense, fwiw. Here's one from a couple weeks ago where they called upon a university to retract its demand that a student paper remove any articles about alleged sexual harassment by a former professor. A couple weeks before that, they took action that appears to have forced a medical school to approve a student's request to start a club promoting single-payer healthcare, which the school had been unfairly denying for months. See also symsymsym's and eephus's posts above.

Don't get me wrong, there is a HUGE amount of "free speech" infrastructure which exists only to bash liberals and create an impression that colleges are PC dungeons, almost all of it better-funded and more widely shared than FIRE's stuff, and FIRE is by no means perfect, but they're better than you'd think they are if you only knew them from when somebody on Fox News cited them.

OTM

Fair enough. The phrase "Individual Rights" though gives me right wing vibes.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-the-vaccine-neurotic

I’d be the last person to claim there aren’t dumb people out there in America, but at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them. The people gobbling down these pieces by Bloomberg and the Times that have the journalistic equivalent of child-proof caps on every paragraph that even parenthetically mentions COVID really believe that content has been dumbed down for some other person. They think it’s someone else who can’t handle news that vaccines work and that there also might be a pill that treats the disease, without freaking out or coming to politically unsafe conclusions. So they put up with being talked to like children — demand it, even.

So sick of this.

sick of what

"You liberals are the real closed-minded dummies!"

The comments section is of course a poem.

that paragraph doesn't make any sense at all

Conservative Contrarian51 min ago

A few friends and I have concluded that one reason folks who have been jabbed are so insistent everyone receive the jab is because even though they hope it was a smart, safe decision; on the chance it was a bad decision, they want everyone to have been equally deceived. It stems from the same trait that causes their craving for “group think”.

but it never was a bad or unsafe decision, ever. people are so stupid

I truly don't understand what that paragraph is meant to say -- it is possible it makes more sense in context but I just don't have the strength to click through.

I know a lot of liberals and they, ok we, go around saying "vaccines work" all the time. Who does Matt Taibbi think I think can't handle that news and how does Matt Taibbi explain why I'm not hiding that news from those people

contrarianism is a siren song. it’s understandable that one would become irritated by the sanctimoniousness and simplicity of like msnbc. but that doesn’t mean good things will come from embracing the opposite of the liberal consensus.

"it’s understandable that one would become irritated by the sanctimoniousness and simplicity of like msnbc"

I'm sorry but msnbc is not sanctimonous about this

I read that paragraph three times, but it must have been equipped with the 'journalistic equivalent of a childproof cap', because it resisted all my efforts to shake any sense out of it.

Basically he is annoyed that reporting on the drug comes with the caveat that it is “not an alternative to vaccines”

The only time Matt Taibbi is annoyed is when he feels like it's been too long (read: more than five minutes) since someone paid attention to him.

So then, because he has now read the same phrase repeated in multiple articles on the same subject, Matt Taibbi thinks the fact that he is annoyed is so important he needs to inform the world about his irritability. I think there are multiple words and phrases that have been invented to describe that attitude. None of them are compliments.

wake up, sheeple!

Matt Taibbi is a right wing troll. That substack article is heinous, he is promoting molnupiravir as a replacement for vaccination

Surprised no one pasted his appearance on Bill Maher's show into this thread. (I haven't watched it.)

How much stock in Merck does Taibbi own?

at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them

What is the evidence that the audience of Fox and OAN knows or understands even one single thing about anything.

This guy's a real fucking butthead if you ask me

The Fox News audience is probably like 98% rubes and 2% evil assholes; while the MSNBC audience is just 100% rubes

sometimes it feels like people decide whether or not they like a person before they decide whether or not they like what they said

Kinda leaves out that there are nuts blinded on the right shooting people over mask mandates and getting the jab, but hey whatever floats your cynical pocketbook heart Taibbi.

sometimes it feels like people decide whether or not they like a person before they decide whether or not they like what they said

well he's a piece of shit AND he says dumb stuff so either way

For those of you (seems like most of you) who didn't read the article:

1. Stop posting in this thread! Jeez. If all you have to add is a one-sentence dunk, consider skipping it and feel free to never open this thread again.
2. I think the point that Taibbi has been making is important. You could make the point that this has been going on forever - that the media is always pushing some sort of elite consensus viewpoint (and I think Taibbi has been beating this drum since the whole WMD fiasco). However, it does seem like Trump and COVID have amped this up to a new level.

Maybe it's a good idea. Maybe the existential threats of Trump and COVID mean that we have to keep contextualizing every story to highlight that angle. Or maybe this isn't the thing that Taibbi should focus his energy on (I'm sympathetic to this argument, but he is still reporting on banking malfeasance, corruption, etc.). However, I think the current awful media landscape is worth reporting on, and even though the abuses are way worse on the right, we should still be concerned about propaganda even when there is a Democrat in the White House.

Personally, these caveats and endless contextualization feels condescending, and Taibbi is right - NYT/WaPo readers already fucking get the context, and people in the right-wing media bubble think the NYT/WaPo are fake news anyway, so what is the point of all of it?

yeah, I don't think Taibbi is a right wing troll, but I do think the media criticism beat is pretty well covered by others. It seems to be pretty popular amongst Substack readers, though, and surely if you're paying your own expenses it makes more financial sense to read the news and critique rather than go out and do reporting.

But I agree with Sam Seder that when Taibbi makes hyperbolic claims, like that the media's crimes in Russiagate are as bad as or worse than the WMD ones, he's ignoring the consequences of those things. On the one hand you have a million or so dead humans. On the other, uh, some annoying Maddow monologues?

frankly the public has no need to hear about mulnipravir right now, the only reason it is in the news at all is because merck is legally obligated to report it before the data are formally published to prevent insider trading issues

in general I will agree that the press has done an awful job of covering the science, though the sort of protestant ethic taibbi seems to aspire to would almost certainly be even worse, as evidenced by just about everything taibbi has had to say about ivermectin and other “controversies”

What is irritating about Taibbi's substack is that the only posts he seems to make public are these ones about the media. I guess they drive traffic/get subscribers. A generous reading would be that he wants to lure people in with complaints about the MSM and then open their eyes to corruption, etc, with his non-public posts. A more probable reason is that Matt just wants more subscribers. In any case, that doesn't make him wrong, just provocative, I guess.

k3v otm

the media is bad but not for this reason

Maybe the existential threats of Trump and COVID mean that we have to keep contextualizing every story to highlight that angle.

Good thought! Keep it up.

Speaking of condescension.

The whole point was, who is this contextualization for? Why is the MSM talking down to their readers if they already get it? Are they hoping to attract dumber readers?

in general I will agree that the press has done an awful job of covering the science

I wouldn't agree with that at all! This stuff is complicated and I think the press has done a -- to me -- unexpectedly good job of being upfront about the difficulties and inherent uncertainties involved.

who is this contextualization for?

I see you have already forgotten how quickly the vast majority of Americans forget almost every fucking thing that has happened since 9/11. And they remember 9/11 because they get constant reminders.

The MSM isn't hoping to attract dumber readers. They are simply acknowledging the brutal fact that without constant contextualization, their readers will lose the context amid the constant torrent of garish stimuli competing for their eyes, ears and minds. Take for example, the January 6th insurrection and the massive and enduring shadow it still casts over every aspect of national politics.

I'm ok with that. It's when the contextualization turns into spin or even straight up lying that it needs to be called out.

The whole point was, who is this contextualization for?

It's for the 30-40 percent of the public — and a much larger percent of the online public — that grabs onto every single news story that can in any way be bent to show that a.) COVID is not as bad as "they" say it is, b.) vaccines don't really work, and/or c.) your dumb lazy ass is perfectly justified in continuing to ignore and make fun of the whole situation. Taibbi is acting like there is not a very real, powerful and consistent effort out there to minimize COVID and discourage vaccination. Maybe he just doesn't have those people in his social media feeds, I don't know, but it's a very real thing and it is directly connected to our still stupidly low vaccination rates.

So on this one, I think he's just wrong and doesn't understand the context, whereas the reporters who are writing about the health/science side of the pandemic are inundated by that bullshit every single day.

You should have seen how overjoyed my local Republican state legislators were when that Israeli study came out suggesting that previous infection gives better protection than vaccination — they were 100 percent reposting it to justify not getting vaccinated, as if the best route is for everybody to just go ahead and get COVID, because if you survive, you'll be less likely to catch it a second time.

i feel like the parallel argument to this is "how dare you combat misinformation, we have a right to be misinformed bc free speech"

don't read the comments -- that's exactly how many of them interpreted Taibbi (among other horrors).

OK you made me read the piece! It is not, in my opinion, good. If you want to insist "the masters of elite media have determined that molnupiravir has incorrect political tendencies and the official organs turned on it within 24 hours," sure, you can find articles with caveats, but -- is this really general? I am online all the time and I had no sense of the existence of a molnupiravir backlash until I saw Taibbi's curated examples. In my media environment, which is pretty mainstream, it's all "this drug reduces hospitalization by 50% and that's good news after a bunch of high-profile failures e.g. convalescent plasma." Like here's coverage from October 5, by which point, per Taibbi, elite consensus to ivermectinize molnupiravir was locked in. Headline is "Everything You Need to Know About Merck’s Game-Changing Covid Pill."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-05/why-a-new-pill-to-treat-covid-could-be-a-game-changer-quicktake

"This drug doesn't eliminate the need for a vaccine" appears in this piece, but as #7 out of 7 bullet points, not exactly the main theme.

yeah but they're so condescending about it