Matt Taibbi's Puff Piece On Tucker Carlson Is Proof He Can't Do Journalism Any More

[Celerity]

After defending Tucker Carlson, we must now accept that the once great reporter is now a shitty one who peddles in conspiracy theories for clicks.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-tucker



Like many other political journalists, I have watched in horror at Matt Taibbi’s bizarre decision to throw his considerable reputation down the toilet and join the outer regions of far left/right conspiracy land. Taibbi’s transformation in recent years into a mouth piece for right wing propaganda has now resulted in him going to bat for America’s most prominent White Supremacist propagandist, Tucker Carlson. In what can only be described as a puff piece, Taibbi interviewed the Fox News host and trotted out a mixture of easily disprovable propaganda to defend him against accusations that he made up a story about the NSA spying on him. In his newsletter, Taibbi paints Carlson as a victim of liberal hysteria and goes to great lengths to convince his readers that he is in fact a brave truth teller railing against the establishment. Even the title of his piece, ‘Spying and Smearing is "Un-American," not Tucker Carlson’ is ridiculous and a testament to how far Taibbi has fallen.

Five years ago, no one could have ever predicted that Taibbi would be defending a racist conspiracy theorist who makes a living on the most repellent, corrosive network in history. Carlson, it must be remembered, has claimed immigrants make America “dirtier”, promoted white replacement theory, and insinuated that the FBI instigated the attempted coup on January 6th. And those are some of the more benign theories he has floated on his nightly show. Taibbi is so impressed with Carlson that he even dedicates a significant amount of time to showcasing his debate prowess and ability to own neocons. “Carlson’s gleeful arson of GOP shibboleths in 2017-2018 was inspired television,” he writes. Defending Tucker Carlson is one thing, fawning over him is another thing entirely. Anyone who has followed Taibbi recently knew this day was coming. His ideological compadre Glenn Greenwald has been doing the rounds on Fox News’s best and whitest for several years now, and it was only a matter of time before Taibbi joined him. It is a sad day though that should mark the end of Taibbi’s reputation as a respected journalist.

Peddler of conspiracy theories

On his show late last month, Tucker Carlson claimed that he had spoken to an anonymous whistle blower who told him that the NSA was “monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.” His show ran the banner: "NSA LEAKED TUCKER'S EMAILS TO JOURNALISTS." To be clear, there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson’s attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin because they do monitor foreign enemies, but there is no evidence the NSA targeted Carlson specifically, knew who he was, or want to take his show off the air. The organization has refuted Carlson’s claims categorically and stated that:



Carlson good, liberals bad

Given Carlson presented his extraordinary claims with no accompanying evidence, they can also be dismissed without evidence. According to Taibbi though, the “odds favor the NSA scandal being true,” because there have been other alleged examples of the NSA engaging in illegal activity in collaboration with the White House and the press. Taibbi conveniently doesn’t present any actual evidence in Carlson’s case either, preferring instead to take the Fox News host’s word for it, even suggesting he could be “whisked away and testicle-whipped in a Langley garage,” or, as Carlson told him, arrested suddenly for “having a meth lab in my basement””. Oddly, Fox News has said nothing about Carlson’s shocking claims and has refused to engage in any reporting on the issue, much to Carlson’s apparent anger. Carlson is, as Vox’s Aaron Rupar notes, “a serial fabulist” with a long history of lying to his audience, so when you weigh up the evidence it is safe to say the story is almost certainly utter nonsense. Citing a truly devastating piece in the Washington Post that lays out in excruciating detail Carlson’s ruthless exploitation of white grievance politics, Taibbi claims the Fox News host is being subjected to “propaganda” that “goes unnecessary miles beyond reality.” Taibbi’s defense of Carlson is bizarre given the Post piece not only describes multiple examples of Carlson’s appalling demagoguery, but also exposes some of his egregious lies. Carlson, for example, made up a particularly cruel story about his former first-grade teacher that turned out to be completely untrue, and totally mischaracterized and lied about an exchange he had with civil rights leader Rev. Sampson for a piece he wrote in Esquire. Carlson doesn’t just bend the truth, he literally makes things up. Taibbi however, claims this is all noise to cover up the real enemy in America: liberals.

The adoption of right wing myths......

snip

[Yavin4]

1. Matt Taibbi is on Putin's payroll

As are a lot of people on the left, not everyone, but a lot.

[Blue Owl]

2. To be honest, I never cared that much for Taibbi in the first place

Only a matter of time before he folded like a cheap card table to Turdoch and the military-industrial complex

[LenaBaby61]

13. "To be honest, I never cared that much for Taibbi in the first place."

Same here!

[Crunchy Frog]

3. Never could. nt

[Lovie777]

4. Who . . .

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. As a long-time Rolling Stone subscriber I find this just as depressing as the author

of this piece.

Guess the money is in political fluff pieces like this rather than the hard-hitting pieces he used to do.

[Celerity]

7. Taibbi left Rolling Stone 15 months ago, and Rolling Stone itself has been taken over by a RW owner

The Demise of Rolling Stone: How A Legendary Magazine Sold Out to Trump and the Saudis



https://hillreporter.com/the-demise-of-rolling-stone-96880

Rolling Stone magazine was once a shining beacon of rebellion. Devoted to telling the truth about its subjects, the publication has often caused controversy throughout its more than fifty years. But in more recent years, the magazine has seen its share of bad publicity in light of bad decision making, which led to the ultimate bad decision: Rolling Stone was sold to the son of Trump-backing multimillionaire Roger Penske, Jay Penske. Jay is a high-profile GOP donor who fired tenured and experienced journalists, then hired hacks to write tabloid level pieces that leaned so far to the right, he was awarded a Presidential Medal from the former guy himself. One member of Penske’s stable is Seth Hettena, a freelance journalist who encouraged people to donate to Trump in 2016 and whose tweets have emerged showing he’s against a living wage and also mocked the SEIU for fighting for $15 an hour. Hettena is a journalist who is also known for going after the likes of Erik Prince and Blackwater. One might infer that Hettena now appears corrupted by the very forces he once sought to investigate.



Hettena recently contacted MeidasTouch, the PAC founded by the Meiselas Brothers, with a list of accusations he was about to write in an article specifically crafted to defame them. Hettena demanded an explanation, but MeidasTouch simply tweeted a reply. And now Hettena’s attempts to smear and silence a group who are clearly seen as a threat to Republicans has just backfired, as the spotlight is now not just on him, but the practices of his boss and his son, Jay Penske, who now runs the magazine.



Jay Penske lives the millionaire playboy lifestyle, with a supermodel wife and a lot of wealthy friends. He was once arrested with his brother in Nantucket for assaulting a woman and urinating on her. But the most compelling thing about Jay Penske is that both he and his father have close ties to the Saudis. Jay Penske took $200 million from a Saudi Arabian government-backed company, SRMG, but has neither explained the loan nor the relationship. And Penske Media Corporation, which employs hundreds of journalists at Variety, Deadline, The Robb Report, WWD and others as well as Rolling Stone, has never publicly addressed the investment tie to the regime, either to defend or explain it. But Rolling Stone did report that Mohammed Bin-Salman (MBS), who is directly connected to the murder of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, acquired a $500 million stake in LiveNation, the biggest producer of live events and concerts in America, via the Saudia Arabian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Seeing as Jay Penske was seen partying with MBS and others aboard his yacht immediately after Khashoggi’s murder, it’s assumed that some or possibly all of the $200 million Jay Penske received was from MBS as well.

Link to tweet

Jay was also in the Oval Office the day his father Roger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the former guy. So what we have is a smear campaign written by a freelance journalist who hates unions but is writing for a publication owned by a Trump shill who parties with the Saudis. Both Rolling Stone and Hettena are also now targeting the vendors who work with MeidasTouch.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/announcement-to-readers-im-moving

[Hugh_Lebowski]

10. Good info thanks!

I should've said I was a long-time subscriber until about 2013, when I started just reading articles online if they interested me.

Very saddened to learned the Penske kid now owns it, I wasn't aware. Whole thing just got even more depressing.

[underpants]

6. I used to be a big fan. He got burned for an abusive workplace and took the easy route

I can’t remember what the publication was but he oversaw a brutallly harassing workplace. This came out before #MeToo. He went the Adam Corolla, BarStool, bro route insulating himself in guy world were no one can get to him. It had to be in there but you still don’t have to go there. Joe Rogan dancing to the edge from time to time but for the most part realizes if you go over the falls there’s no coming back.

[Celerity]

11. The eXile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi

Taibbi moved to Russia in 1992. He lived and worked in Russia and the former USSR for more than six years. He joined Mark Ames in 1997 to co-edit the English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile, which was written primarily for the city's expatriate community. The eXile's tone and content were highly controversial. To some, its commentary was brutally honest and gleefully tasteless; others considered it juvenile, misogynistic, and even cruel. In the U.S. media during this time, Playboy magazine published pieces on Russia both by Taibbi and by Taibbi and Ames together. In 2000, Taibbi published his first book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, co-authored with Ames. He later stated that he was addicted to heroin while he did this early writing.

Journalist Kathy Lally wrote in The Washington Post in December 2017 that she and other female journalists were subjected to misogynistic attacks by Taibbi and Ames while she was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1990s. Lally contacted Taibbi in 2017, and he told her, "I certainly would not go about things now the way I did back then," and "I apologize for the physical descriptions. That was gratuitous and uncalled for."

In 2017, Taibbi came under fire for excerpts from a chapter in the book written by Ames that described sexual harassment of employees at The eXile. In a Facebook post responding to the controversy, Taibbi apologized for the "cruel and misogynistic language" used in the book, but said the work was conceived as a satire of the "reprehensible" behavior of American expatriates in Russia and that the description of events in the chapter was "fictional and not true". Although the book includes a note saying that it is a work of non-fiction, emails obtained by Paste magazine in 2017 include a representative of the publisher, Grove Press, saying the "statement on the copyright page is incorrect. This book combines exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting and was categorized as nonfiction because there is no category for a book that is both."

In 2017, two women portrayed in the book told Walker Bragman of Paste that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book "ever happened".

[underpants]

16. I knew it was in Russia. Thanks.

I remember it being worse than that. Well anyway he went to where he went. I used to love how he wrote. I see him on Twitter and it appears he’s trying to push back and be an asshole mostly for those purposes.

[SharonAnn]

18. My favorite sentence of all time is his, from a Rolling Stone article.

“Goldman Sachs is a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood-funnel into anything that smells like money.”

It really describes Goldman Sachs, and many other organizations.

[underpants]

19. ✅

[AZSkiffyGeek]

8. Like Greenwald, he's always been a Libertarian nt

[LenaBaby61]

14. "Like Greenwald, he's always been a Libertarian."

This 👆🏻

[dsc]

9. He was horrible during the 2004 primary campaign

and I said so in real time. He was a deeply unserious man writing deeply unserious pieces about all of our candidates. His piece about Wesley Clark was particularly egregious.

[Crunchy Frog]

15. Yes. I still remember that. Haven't been able to take him seriously since.

[shrike3]

20. He seemed to think it was all there for his amusement.

Never understood why he appealed to so many.

[ChrisF1961]

12. I never liked him

Always thought he was arrogant and anti the Democratic Party.

[cab67]

17. I liked him until his anti-Clinton bigotry began to shine through.