Breaking History - The Slow Death of Journalism, with Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Matt Taibbi has spent the better part of a decade documenting one of the most underreported stories in American media: how the federal government built a shadow infrastructure to shape what people could say and read online. In this episode, Eli Lake sits down with Taibbi to trace the full journey. It starts with the post-2016 Senate hearings that spooked Silicon Valley into compliance, and it ends with the chaotic information environment we live in today. They also dig into the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Covid misinformation crackdown, and whether the formal censorship bureaucracy is really gone or just harder to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back, Breaking History listeners. This is a real treat. This is Matt Taibi. In my view, there are a lot of people who kind of needlessly threw around the idea of intellectually courageous and so forth. But Matt really does put his money where his mouth is and manages to, I think, infuriate all sides in a good way. And write what he believes and has paid the consequences, whether it's kind of spurning a friendship with Elon Musk, certainly angering people on the center right like myself. I think recently refusing to toe the line on the left.

I have to say I really, you're one of the writers I really admire. And to somebody who was friends with the late Christopher Hitchens, I've always thought that you kind of really are in his footsteps. So thank you so much, Matt, for coming on. That is a very generous introduction, Eli. Thank you so much. And you've been great. And I've been increasingly reading you a lot lately.

So I feel like we're – There's a time I think when Matt and I were like secretly like we despised each other. But anyway. No, that was my fault. But go ahead. My fault, too. I want to just kind of ask you because you started something, I guess it was in the Biden era on Rackett, which I loved. It was a feature called Meathicensored.

Tell me about how you started that and who was on that list. And like, what are we talking about and what was the problem like when you started it? And then we'll talk about how things are now. So the genesis of this was in the summer of a, I believe it was 2018. when Alex Jones was removed from the internet. And I read a couple of stories about how Facebook and some other internet platforms had received recommendations from the Atlantic Council about which sites to remove. And then there was a kind of a small, lightly covered story about what was later called the purge, where there were about 600 or 800 sites that were just wiped out for no, no apparent reason.

They called it coordinated inauthentic activity. And I thought, well, that's kind of a crazy story. So I pitched my editors at Rolling Stone a story about what was happening with all these small independent kind of mom-and-pop media organizations that in some cases had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in boosting their audience with the site only to wake up and have it all be gone. And in the course of doing that story, I think. found out, you know, this was finding out how bad the digital censorship and how elaborate

it was already. I think, I think it had gone farther down the road than most people had any sense of. And I did a story in Rolling Stone. They were so afraid. What year was this? This was 18. It's still 18. 2018. Yeah. And they were so, they were, even Rolling Stone was so worried about being seen as anti-censorship, um, that they changed the headlines. And in the story. It now reads Who Will Fix Facebook because they wanted to appear to be on the side of getting rid of hate speech

and that sort of stuff on the site. Anyway, long story short, I realized that there was a real problem with getting people in the media mainstream to pay attention to this issue. So I went out of my way to cover people on the political

left who had for whatever reason had been censored, suppressed, shadow band, whatever it was. And I did that for years. And of course, got very little traction except on sort of the very, you know, left end sites, basically. So it starts on the left, but you're, you, you, you, you, you brought in, I mean, I remember reading one about Sherry DeVille, the porn star.

I mean, you did, you covered the whole range. It was not a question of my ideological comrades are being censored. and so I'm going to come to there. I'm going to be the white night. It was, I don't like censorship, period. And let's talk about what, you know, these individuals who've had their sites deep platform. Yeah.

And I wasn't really thinking about the, the ideology of it or who was getting it worse or any of those things. I was really very interested in the mechanics of it. Because the real question is what, you know, what do these platforms have in their tools? boxes to use against their customers and are they getting direction from somewhere? What's triggering somebody being taken offline? Even in the Alex Jones case, there was a very, I thought, serious unanswered question about whether that had been coordinated between different companies. Was that anti-competitive behavior? Like what went on there? And we still don't really know the answer to that.

So that's what I was focusing on is what triggers us. What causes a porn star to lose her sight? like what causes, you know, a medical professional to be, you know, forced to use different terminology. That's what I was doing. Now, before we get to the kind of what I thought was brilliant reporting, Barry Weiss was involved too, but was the Twitter files. But I want to kind of get to the roots of it. I think you and I might, I think we agree that this starts because of the freak out after the 2016 election. And there was this view that Facebook was in its news feed. it was being manipulated by foreign actors, and people were getting disinformation about the election.

And this became an obsession as part of the Russia Gate stuff that we both covered. And that led to real policy changes in the companies themselves and the relationship to the government. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. And I found out the bulk of the answer to this question while doing the Twitter files. But yeah, to answer your question, even looking from the outside, you could see that After 2016, suddenly the Senate was furious about foreign interference, and they were dragging the heads of these companies. Remember, there was sort of weird, like show trialy appearances by executives from Twitter, Facebook, and Google. And they would be hauled into these hearings.

And, you know, there would be a demand, what are you going to do to stop the sewing of discord on? on your platforms. And these executives would give these answers as if they were terrified of not sounding compliant. And these are the same people who had previously said things like, I don't want to be the editor-in-chief of the universe. It's not our job. I mean, I knew some of the people in the business pretty well. And they very much did not want to be in the business of picking and choosing content.

But after 2016, 2017, there was a radical change within the tech business, and they all started to adopt a new posture toward content. Okay. So I always found this to be one of the classic examples of like, if you care about free speech, be wary, because it starts with a fairly reasonable point. We don't think that foreign bots and foreign influencers should be. able to disguise themselves as Americans. That makes sense if you want to say, if you want to put a little thing saying this is somebody, this account is based in wherever, that seems reasonable. But then pretty soon, it went to include all kinds of things that we did not anticipate

with the original rationale. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it included both hate speech, but then election denial. And then later under COVID, medical misinformation. And by the end of Trump's first presidency, it was. like we really were living in a censorship digital regime, right? I mean, that's the thing is that it starts with this kind of, oh, right? Everybody can agree.

Maybe the Russians did something here. And then it ends in four years. It's like off to the races, right? Yeah. So what's interesting about this is that if you go back and look, if you remember the big terrorist attacks in Europe, you know, the ones in, I believe it was Brussels and in France, that led to a series of demands by the EU

that all the major internet platforms sign these voluntary codicils on changing their approach to what they call terrorist speech. But the essence of it was that it created a new relationship between the platforms and the security state where they were responsible. Again, what's so interesting about this is that the format kind of replicated itself endlessly the same basic structure of you're not being directly

censored, but the state is telling a private company that it has to exercise its speech rights in a certain way. And so all the companies sign these sort of quote-unquote voluntary agreements under very heavy pressure with Europe in 2016. And then the same thing happened after Trump and Brexit here in the United States, again, the same process I just described to you where they were dragged to the hill and there was a sort of unspoken threat that if you don't play ball, we're going to regulate you much more severely. There's going to be higher taxes, et cetera, et cetera. And so they started to institute essentially the same system that Europe was formerly moving toward, which was you have to abide by the recommendations of, you know,

sort of impartial NGOs that will flag things for you and then you then take them down. That's when I mentioned at the very beginning, the sites that were taken down at the behest of, you know, after recommendations from the Atlantic Council, that's essentially the format that Europe had already adopted where, you know, some NGO tells you this is bad content and the company, in most cases, just takes down the content or deamplifies it. So, yeah, that's exactly what happened. It starts off with a premise that sounds reasonable. we don't want Russian bots giving us the news, but it very quickly expanded into other universes, which we found out at the Twitter files. So let's go through it because I feel like the Twitter files,

in a weird way, that story hit kind of, you know, before we found out how decrepit Biden was, and there was a kind of, so it hit at a moment when there was a lot of pushback because people hated Elon Musk, and they've, they almost, I mean, I remember, being extremely jealous of like, hey, I wish I was called to look at this. I mean, it's like story of the century kind of thing. Oh, I know. Yeah, I was jealous of myself, but yeah, go ahead. You had a lot of journalists at the time who were saying that you had sold

out because you were, you know, looking at these raw files and finally kind of getting at the bottom of the story, which itself was strange. But just go into like, what do we, how bad was it in your review? How would you describe what we learned in Twitter files was actually this was what was going on. First of all, about the criticism about selling out and everything. I don't know any journalist who wouldn't be, you know, to excuse the term, like very horny to look at this material, right? Like, it just does not happen that the CEO of a major company says, come rummage around in our files unsupervised. Right. Just doesn't happen. So when that opportunity presented itself, I had actually very low expectations of what we were going to find.

The available evidence superficially was really pretty limited to Mark Zuckerberg talking about maybe being pressured on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which, you know, that would be a big deal in itself if it were true. But we didn't know anything about any kind of other bureaucracy or anything going on underneath that. And what's interesting is the first stuff that we saw didn't even really point us in that direction. It wasn't until about a week after we started getting access to things that suddenly we started seeing all these little notes in Slack chats that would say flagged by FBI, flagged by DHS, flagged by FITF, which is the foreign influence task force of the FBI. and we started to learn about all these acronyms that we didn't even know about, flag by Geck, which is the Global Engagement Center of the State Department.

And I'm thinking, why is the State Department of the United States sending recommendations about domestic content to a company like Twitter? It made no sense at all. And it took a lot of digging and kind of jigsaw puzzle work to figure it out. But eventually we learned that there was a very formal structure that probably about 20 different companies were involved with where complaints or recommendations for censorship that came from the federal government would go through the FBI. And the ones that came from the states would go through the DHS. And they would be processed. They would all get a look by the sort of trust and safety departments of these.

companies, which I thought was horrifying. Like, you know, it's, it's like finding a secret city underneath, you know, the town you've been walking around for your whole life. So it was crazy. Okay. Now, I just want to get to the Hunter Biden laptop because just to refresh, the New York Post had gotten the contents of the laptop. They published a story.

And the story was deemed to be Russian disinformation. and you weren't even allowed to share it. And then they had to delete a post in order to kind of get back. And this is a month before the election. The New York Post, America's oldest newspaper. And there was, of course, the 51 former intelligence officers who signed a letter saying it has all the hallmarks of without exactly saying it was Russian disinformation. What was kind of a red pill, many of many red pill moments for me was when we learned later that the FBI itself had authenticated the laptop. Right.

It was part of an investigation. And yet another arm of the FBI. What happened there was saying don't put it out there? I mean, well, there were a lot, there were, many different things were going on there. One, which I think was incredibly serious and still, it's gotten almost no press, no follow up, was that the FBI was briefing the Senate and telling them that the laptop was not real after they had actually verified the fact that it, you know, this was genuine. So, you know, the FBI giving a false briefing to the U.S. Senate, I think is a pretty major story,

especially in the middle of a presidential election. You know, and again, I wasn't a Trump supporter, right? So I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, wow, that's really bad. That was happening. The FBI was communicating with all the major internet platforms. And we didn't find harder evidence about this until later. But they essentially, they were recommending. that they avoid what they called hack and leak stories.

And the company's adopted new policies. Now, to be clear, like a hack and leak is a legitimate form of journalism. Like, there's even a Supreme Court case about this that says that you can publish stolen material. It's, as long as it's real, there's no real reason to have a prohibition against it. But Twitter was told or it assumed that this material had been stolen. stolen and dumped by the Russians. And so they banned it on that basis. And as you said, they even prevented people from,

they used the very highest form of censorship that they have that is used for like child porn. Like you can't even share it in DMs, that kind of thing. And then they locked the account of the New York Post. And then subsequently we found out that a lot of these, the major reporters have been briefed about the possibility of the, the story's existence at an Aspen Institute meeting like two months before the story broke and had wargamed how to not cover it, which was another thing we found. That's absolutely.

That's unbelievably extraordinary. I mean, I just want to underline this. The way, one of the things about our free press in America is that we're supposed to all be competing with each other. Exactly. So when you have a group of other, of journalists from all these other things, and I've been to these Aspen security forums, I mean, not. that one, but I've been to them. There is an element where no, we're no longer competing. We're

all collaborating. And that right there is, you know, it's not the same as Pravda and the state run media in this former Soviet Union, but it's kind of, you're getting, you're on the road there. So that's funny. I was actually a member of the union of journalists, the old, right, in Russia. But, but yes, and and giving each other off the record privileges too, right? That's a big deal. Like, you're sitting around getting briefed on something, and then it turns out to be a story later, and you're kind of bound not to say anything. Seems kind of crazy to me. But, yeah, you're absolutely right.

No, I agree. I mean, and I have to say, I haven't been to the Aspen Security Forum in some years, but I know exactly what that environment is like. And it is a problem, especially when it gets to that point of like, oh, where there's a big story that might be coming out. Oh, really? What does it say? So now, just, I mean, we're going pretty fast. Eventually, I think this all breaks in part because there are some important legal challenges, which I think does start to name names and put pressure on these companies, and then Trump's elected in 24.

And it's a little strange because Mark Zuckerberg was very enthusiastic about these kinds of initiatives at one point, then sort of turns on a dime, and he becomes the broligarch. He becomes the guy who, you know, yeah, I'm tired of wokeness. And it seems like the vibe really did shift. Elon basically kind of does an amnesty for a lot of the band accounts on Twitter. And all of it seems to kind of fade away. Has it? No.

Where are we right now? Well, so on the plus side, as far as I can tell, the formal. bureaucracies that had been established pre-Trump have actually been dismantled. So the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, which was a pretty significant organization. Right. You know, what was actually broken up. They physically scattered the people in the department, the different places. The FITF and the FBI, as far as I understand, has also been taken down. We don't know a whole lot about what's going on at the Pentagon, and we only got to see a little bit of what their operations looked like. So I'm not 100% confident that those operations have been stopped. So that's the good

part, right? Like the United States was trending toward being folded into this system that they have in Europe now, which is this is a horrific draconian sweeping law called the Digital Services Act, which is essentially a gigantic Orwellian kind of oversight law. We're not doing that, but the individual platforms are still, you know, wading things as they see fit and deamplifying some accounts to an extreme degree and other accounts are being amplified to an extraordinary degree. On X, I think it's pretty obvious that some accounts are getting a lot more airtime

and others are not, right? And so the problem still exists. Anytime you're going to have private owners, these companies are going to have some kind of viewpoint about what they're, about what to amplify and what not to do. And by the way, this was Barry's big, you know, contribution to the Twitter files was discovering how,

you know, the de amplification and shadow banning works. Right. But they all do it. I don't think it's a whole lot better than it was before. But the one thing that's a plus in my view is that it's two different things as opposed to one. If you're going to have a bad system, I'd rather have two of them than one. Because at least in that arena, you have some hope of getting some kind of leverage to reduce the amount of censorship. So now I'm going to come at it in a different way.

which is to say, I don't think there's any, I'm not making it a defense of the censorship, particularly of the late teens in early 2020s. It was over, it was too much. And, you know, these kind of corporate bureaucrats and federal bureaucrats had way too much power. And it was ridiculous. And true stories were censors we know with a hundred laptop.

But the prevalence and popularity of just slop and conspiracy theories and nonsense is really a feature of social media today, it seems. And just as an example of that, I kind of want to get your thoughts on this, is that we saw, I have no, I'm not a hater of Joe Rogan. I occasionally watch the clips. But the vice president of the United States went on Joe Rogan. He was asked about the Epstein files.

And his response was, in my view, I'm still gobsmacked. He basically said that, you know, he looked through it. He couldn't find, but they were probably, he was probably linked to Mossad, probably linked to the U.S. intelligence community, but we'll never know because they probably destroyed those. And that is like puring gasoline because of who he is, the vice president, on a wild conspiracy. We're never going to be rid of this. And so, like, are we living in some ways in the worst of both worlds where there's still some censorship? but we don't have at least the function of keeping, you know, nonsense, you know, doesn't get a megaphone where it seems to right now. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And, you know, you and I both came up in journalism during a time. One, it was relatively rare for something that was factually completely wrong to appear in the news. there were pretty good mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening. People could be wrong in a general sense sort of politically or they could make an assertion that was outlandish, but you couldn't say something that was just untrue about an individual, for instance, and expecting away with it. It was career ending in many cases if you did that.

That is no longer the case. Now you can say basically anything you want to, and there's no expectation that. anything will happen to you. People have figured out that the algorithms on these sites reward the most outlandish kinds of behavior. I mean, the analogy I like to use is that if the when the algorithm determines that your circle of this, these are your interests, it looks for something that's right in the middle, right? It doesn't want to, it doesn't want to feed you anything that's outside your zone of thought. It wants to feed something that's right in the middle of your most extreme views.

And so you get this progression of sort of escalating insanity on the internet. And especially if your livelihood depends on traffic, people, in some cases, they don't even want to, but they drift in that direction. And that's very, very unhealthy. But I don't know what the answer to that is, right? Like, there is no corresponding mechanism to, for instance, the New York Times v. Sullivan universe that we lived in in the 80s and 90s where people were afraid before they published something of getting things wrong. Look at some of the most popular podcasters out there today and the stuff they say. They're clearly not worried about that.

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a month, $12 a day. Rated number one by CNET and The Verge. When I'm researching for the show, I'm pulling from a lot of sensitive sources, and I need to protect that information. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash breaking history. That's eX-P-R-E-S-V-P-N.com. slash breaking history to find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com slash breaking history. I want to maybe dive into like why is this what, I mean, I think your, the algorithms is part of it. I would add that when you had the people kind of at the commanding heights of the culture and media telling you that the president very well may be a Russian asset and that that turned out to

be like literally disinformation from a political campaign. Right. And then there was no accountability for it. So you still see the same people who told you that and they just act as if it never happened. That that might lead someone to say, well, maybe nothing that I thought I knew is true. And that can lead to what is almost a kind of, what, informational despair where you just are, you know, you'll believe anything.

Yeah, like nihilism almost. right? Yeah, like a kind of a nihilism, but it's a nihilism that's born from a, I'm not going to be fooled again. So it's not like, and some of it might be that you have charismatic political and media leaders from Tucker Carlson, apparently now to J.D. Vance, although I don't know if I think J.D. Vance believes, you know, Susie Wiles in the famous profile said he's a conspiracy theorist. I don't know if he is or if he's playing a conspiracy theorist because he's trying to get the votes of conspiracy theorists. But, Whatever it is, we now have, it's now, you know, Anna, Paulina Luna, I think you're a representative in Congress who has called, I mean, I'm all for declassifying government documents. I did a whole thing on the Kennedy assassination where I said, I'm not a, I don't believe that it was a conspiracy. I think Oswald was a single government, but I understand why many people do think it was because the government lied to us about many other things in that moment, including the Kennedy assassination. So I get it. But it's why are we, I mean, how do, I mean, we are seem to be in a kind of doom loop, at least, and particularly on the political right, where people believe crazy theories about how the world works that ultimately is, disempowers themselves. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like ultimately, we can't do anything about it because there's a they. And usually the they are the Jews. But that's a separate question.

But, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's difficult. if you release a gazillion files like they did in the case of the Epstein situation. Right. And the Trump administration only has itself to blame for this gigantic mess that they got themselves into with Epstein because so many of the people who ended up joining the administration were pounding the table about how the proof is going to be in these files and we're going to let them out. So that creates this groundswell of expectation about the importance of the story and what the story means. And so when you release all this stuff into the public, there is a tendency for people to, you know, misinterpret what they're looking at. They don't realize sometimes that when, you know, people send all kinds of complaints to the FBI. And that doesn't mean that they're true or that they have any, you know, basis in reality.

But people will chase them as if they're real stories. though there's a guild by association thing that happens that's that's another unfortunate left over from this you know kind of cancel culture era that we're in but yeah absolutely like the the there is a conspiracism that's been sort of wrapped into how people consume news now that is really unfortunate and for my part like I I I really very much blame the traditional press for this because they had an opportunity to hold themselves out as, you know, the ultimate arbiters of what is true and what is not by holding themselves to high standards. But as you say, when they keep falling, not even falling for, when they, when they keep promoting openly wrong

stories like WMDs or, you know, the Russiagate thing, another bad example was, you know, the COVID story. When, you know, we looked in the Twitter files and there, There's a very important concept in there that I don't think people have wrapped their heads around. Like, during the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about people from among people in these companies about how, you know, this is an emergency. We really need to prevent deaths. So we have to get ahead of the curve in terms of stopping bad information. And so let's not, let's not focus on individual things. Let's look at narratives.

So the standard becomes anything that promotes hesitancy is a kind of disinformation. But very often this was true information. Like, right, somebody goes to get the vaccine, they get myocarditis and die. Now, that might be rare, but it happened. It's not disinformation, but the companies were suppressing this. And then they were suppressing stuff that they were wrong about, right? Like, for instance, they break through infections. They thought they thought were an exceedingly rare thing.

And so the CDC was telling all these companies, you know, to shut that down. But they were wrong about that. And so that's like an official conspiracy theory, which is the worst. To me, that is the worst of all possible worlds. When you have one big blanket sort of authority and they're telling you something that's not true. and you can't see the alternative used. Or the origins of COVID, which were suppressed. And then our role in funding, you know,

some of the research, gain of function research, was also suppressed. And that, to me, is unforgivable, which is another part of all of this. Yeah, exactly. And they were also at the same time that they were suppressing that. They were also organized campaigns against doing your own research. right you know you would see all all this stuff um on both both in the messaging of medical officials

but also in kind of pop culture picking on people who did that but yeah if you don't have access to the basic materials and you're being told something that isn't true uh it creates a very unhealthy situation now the the problem i think was that there was this kind of, you know, shift, and there was a sense of there was like, oh, it's a medical emergency. We have to get a lot of people to take this. We can't have. But then there is an overcorrection, which is that just because there were lies told by medical, by the pharmaceutical companies and the CDC about the COVID vaccine does not mean that

vaccines themselves are a fraud, but we have lots of people who now think that, including some of them in the secretary of the health and human services, which is the problem we're kind of living in right now. So it's like we've sort of overcorrected in a sense because of the, because the institutions themselves were kind of exposed. Is that what you're basically saying? Yeah. Yeah. So, to me, it's all downstream from the same initial problem, right? If you don't tell the truth to people about a vaccine, then they're going to their thoughts are going to wander towards, well, what happened with other vaccines? Well, why should we trust this? And, you know, there are a few things.

It's a mixed bag. Like, people did accept some disinformation about vaccines in the day, but you can absolutely go too far and do essentially the same thing. Like, if you're, if the CDC is telling you that they want you to block out a whole narrative about anything that promotes hesitancy, well, you can go in the other direction and say, well, anything about vaccines is bad. and we don't want to promote that. And so you get these sort of competing wrong visions of how to do media.

When, again, the reality of most stories is that everything is idiosyncratic. There's a mix of true and false in almost every story. And this is what bothers me. I'm sure it's probably true with you too. When we used to do reporting, like it was kind of understood that there were going to be some things that were true, some things that we're not. Like, we have to hash out what the little details are. But now everybody wants you to sign on to some big,

sort of almost like a monotheistic theory about things. And those are almost never true. And people have become very simple. Almost never true at all. Right. Right. Right. Usually the world's pretty messy.

Usually there aren't conspiracies. Usually you can explain things because human beings are flawed and they make errors and people get into group think, I mean, there's all kinds of things usually of how it works and occasionally there really is a conspiracy. Dr. Fauci really did tell people to

not mention the fact that we paid for the gain of funding. Like that's true. Right. And that's and like you can point to that and you can point to the fact that you know, the FBI had ample evidence you know, by

I would say February or March of 2017 that the entire Russia Gate story was wrong and they flamed it and they acted as if it was an ongoing investigation. So that was pretty terrible. And there are examples of that occasionally that you kind of get like, oh my God, this is sinister.

But usually it's just incompetent. Right. Right. Usually. And but even sometimes I covered both of those stories, right? Like I was kind of maybe a little bit too obsessed with the Russia Gate story. I was

one of the first people who to say, I don't know, this doesn't feel right to me. And I was there with you. Let's just be real. I could not, when we finally learned who Christopher Steele's sources in Russia were and how that

information, I, that was it for me. I was like, oh my God. Right. That's the source, because I was assuming that they had some Kremlin insider or something. I just, I mean, I was like, there's no way. The FBI in the sea. I mean, how could our U.S. intelligence

community, which I've covered for years, have been basically, I mean, it's like a researcher who, by the way, was investigated for maybe being a Russian agent. Right. Who was hired by a private contractor who had drinks with, like, people he knew. What? The whole thing was kind of like

pathetic. You know, I mean, it was like, wow. It was incredible. I remember talking to a friend of mine and like a who was still in journalism at the time. This was at the end. of 2016 who was saying this is either the biggest intelligence story in history right that the russians have gotten a manchurian candidate in the white house or it's the biggest hoax in it

there's there's no other middle ground like we're either lied to on an unprecedented scale or or the russians have pulled off something amazing and that dichotomy was really hard to to navigate for a long time. You know, it was very hard to wrap one's head around the idea that either thing could be true. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm sure you went through the, you know, days where you thought, I went through days of thinking, I must be seeing this wrong somehow. Like, I must be missing something.

And, you know, it turned out to be completely crazy. in some ways worse than I thought, again, because I assumed that a former senior MI6 guy would have had Russian sources. That's the part of it that I should have realized that actually know they're all incompetent grifters. He was in a business to make other people think he had hot information, as was global GPS or whatever. All of these people were in this business. of making it appear that they had something they didn't. Yeah, and then you find out as you're looking at this that there are other things that you imagine couldn't possibly be true that are true, like that, you know, a high-ranking,

you know, maybe not a station chief, but something on that order in MI6, who is living in Moscow doesn't speak Russian. Like, how is that possible? Right, how is that? That's a great one. Right. It's one of those things where it's like that scene in all the president's men where they got the big story run because they assume that certain questions must have been asked in the grand jury and they weren't. Like we assume that the MI6 spy in charge of the Russia desk knows some Russians. Right. And it turns out not to be the case. So it's incredible. And there are all these, exactly.

So that is, that, that is, so, so that is, so, so the remaining time, and what do we, how do we go forward? You know, we're like old guys now. Right. And we, you know, maybe journalism will never go back to how we came up in the business, but what is it that you do to kind of get back, both the trust of a lot of Americans, but also just pushing aside things that seem like self-discrediting? I mean, the Charlie Kirk news cycle is kind of amazing to me in the sense that it's, again, I understand why there were conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination because the assassin was murdered. So we didn't have a trial. But we have a trial now.

And it's all coming out. And like, you know, if you have a problem with it, take it up with the, you know, go to, you know, what to address the evidence, you know. But it's, Candace doesn't seem to be letting it go. seem to, and it seems like this is going to still remain this huge story, and I just don't understand why. So how do we get out of it? You know, I would have originally said that all these things eventually resolve themselves, that, you know, trust, journalism is a trust business. Trust is, it's a human quality. You can't, you can't mechanize it. You can't make an algorithm that approximates it, it's just something that you have to do. And the only way you can

gain trust with people is to show them over and over and over again that you care about what's correct. And that it's part of your value system that if you get something wrong, you'll admit it. If you get something really wrong multiple times, maybe you should take up something else for a living. I don't know. But that's how traditionally, journalists looked at this and they thought, okay, if we just try our best over and over again to you know, get things right, then people will keep coming back to us eventually, right? There will be, there will always be tulipomanias that pop up and people lose their minds about stuff. Unfortunately, that's kind of like the standard, you know, sort of product and trade

right now is, is the mania. It's how people get paid in media. is to try to drum up some kind of internet fury about something and then ride the monetization wave all the way up. And the incentives for people to tell the, you know, sort of tell audiences a truth that might be partially disappointing or, you know, dramatically unsatisfying. It's gone. I just, I worry that, you know, unless we figure out a way for people to get more audience by being more careful, it's going to continue down this path. Also, we're not punishing politicians for doing this either, right? Like, this is another thing you talked about. Right.

You know, in the Trump era, he's figured out that there, you can say almost anything. But what he had, the reason he wins in elections is because, um, He gives off this feeling of genuineness that the Democratic Party politicians often don't have. And so even though he might be factually incorrect, he's scoring with people on some other level. And so we're not punishing politicians for saying untrue things either. And so it's a very dangerous moment. I honestly, I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are. Like, I don't know how we get out of this.

glimmer of hope the big speech that trump gave on thursday night which i think was generated basically through cherry picking intelligence reports um and it fizzled and it didn't and you didn't really see a bunch of people in maga going crazy about the chinese stole the 2020 election and all the things that trump wanted to convey it didn't really land now that might be a reflection of the fact that Trump's maybe kind of already a lame duck and, you know, the thrill is gone. But it might also mean that we've become somewhat ignored to the kind of spectacle of things like that. I mean, in some ways, I think, again, I don't have a problem with, you know, declassify more. I think we have too many state secrets.

So I'm fine with that. But it was so obviously selectively declassified, which is that you could tell when you were going through it. You're like, wait a second. This is one guy, but what were the other people saying about this? And I don't even know what the source is he's referring to in China that tells them, you know what I mean? You couldn't really evaluate it based on what they put out. So maybe it is true.

I mean, I don't put anything past the Chinese government. I mean, sure. I'm sure they're trying to do all kinds of things. But so that to me was maybe a sign that we might be reaching, you know, we're kind of getting past it. And then hopefully we can get a better. set of leaders that hold themselves to the higher standard. And then again, I think that, I mean, I have no, I don't know, let's let's devote the last part of this to. What's going on?

I mean, do you see any hope for some of the major legacy media operations? I mean, there's an effort, by the way, to, in the Washington Post to make the opinion page better, I think it is better. But that's the opinion page. Yeah, and they're still getting killed financially. Right. The New York Times is doing better, right? I mean, better relatively to Washington Post. But, you know, that paper is still infuriating.

It's sure. It doesn't, it doesn't acknowledge its mistakes. It's overtly political. Like it seems like it sticks in almost like a Soviet-style sub-lead after the opening paragraph in almost every major news story. So that's depressing. And yeah, the people I see coming out of journalism school now have a completely different idea about what the job is than the people from our generation. And, you know, I don't know that the old system, like I was very critical of the old objectivity system when I was coming up.

I thought, you know, everything is an editorial choice, right? There is papers and networks are always trying to push you in one direction or the other in subtle ways. But as an aspiration, actually, you know, now that I'm getting older, like I look back and I say, well, that wasn't the worst idea in the world, right? It's good to have. Oh, and they competed for stories. So it's like Sy Hirsch went after Woodward and Bernstein and they tried to get the best, they tried to advance the story on Watergate. Right. That was great.

Yeah. Absolutely. And they were, and, you know, they were doing it according to kind of established rules of warfare that all journalists accepted. It was, it was also, by the way, collegial in a way that the job isn't now. You know, when I worked overseas, you know, in Russia, all the correspondents knew one in a, one another. Even if we kind of went after each other publicly You were

notorious. Yes, I was. Hard games back in the day. Yeah, but even so, we got along pretty well actually with a lot of the other reporters. And the idea of kind of moving stories forward was a good one.

It didn't be great. I wasn't upset when, say, David Philip up of the Boston Globe got a, you know, got a that I didn't. That doesn't, like, it's not supposed to bother you when somebody else finds out something that's true. And now we have this thing that's just completely different.

It's just, it's only, like, sort of interpersonal warfare. And the issue of what's true and what's factually right is, it feels like it's, like, at minimum, maybe a third or fourth level consideration for most of these folks. Right, right. Right, right. And you have like, you know, I mean, I'm so glad we're hopefully done with the fact-checking. Remember that? The independent fact-checkers. God. And I'm like, you know, what I call it a bit, journalism, exactly, right? Like, we don't need another set of, you know, but yeah. That was the weirdest thing ever. We're like, so we're going to have an entirely separate, you know, sort of organization that is going to tell you the same thing that we already told you in our ages. implicitly. I don't know. That was weird.

Yeah. All right. Well, this was great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I can't, I just want to, you know, subscribe to Rackett News, which is Matt's site. And you have incredible range, by the way. I love that you're now kind of reading great books. Yeah.

Writing about them. I kind of wanted to, I want to start doing that myself, which is I think it's a great excuse to sort of read the classics, but it's also very important to kind of like use different muscles. Yeah, it's grounding. I think one of the things I've found are our audience tends to be kind of in the middle somewhere maybe but they enjoy these little breaks from the part of the mania of media and you know old books

have a lot to tell us you know still currently so it's been a lot of fun doing that yeah no that's so that's that's been great anyway thank you matt this was a great conversation I appreciate it thanks a lot of you're on.