Episode 88- Rich and Matt Taibbi

Brian Kruger:
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.
And welcome to the Common Bridge. Rich’s guest today is Matt Taibbi and Matt is an author, a journalist, and he’s also a podcaster. He reports on finance, media, politics, sports, and a lot of other things. He’s a contributing editor for Rolling Stone Magazine and he’s authored several books. And he also publishes a newsletter on Substack. Now this podcast was also recorded for simultaneous broadcast on Richard Helppie’s new Common Bridge on YouTube. So check that out, hit the subscribe button and you can get more of Rich’s interviews there. So let’s join Rich and Matt Taibbi in conversation.

Rich Helppie:
So we’re sitting today with Matt Taibbi, Matt, thank you for joining us on the Common Bridge. Of course, the Common Bridge is the fiercely nonpartisan podcast-and now YouTube channel, where we discuss policy, we discusse how to solve the problems of the day, how to seize the opportunities of the moment, with many distinguished guests. And we have with us today, author and journalist, so welcome to the Common Bridge.

Matt Taibbi:
Rich, thank you for having me.

Rich Helppie:
You’re writing for Rolling Stone and others and your books, which-you have the best book titles-Insane Clown President is a great title, Hate, Inc. And I found those to be very attractive. And you wrote an article earlier this month called We Need A New Media System. Tell our audience of the Common Bridge about that, please.

Matt Taibbi:
It’s based on the ideas that are in the book you’ve referenced, Hate, Inc., which is really a story about how the commercial model of the news business, which I grew up in-my father was also a reporter, how that’s changed in the last 40 years. We used to, back in the days of the three networks, the commercial strategy, was to go for the whole audience. And now with the advent of cable and the internet and the atomization of the news landscape, the dominant strategy commercially is to pick a demographic and just try to dominate it by feeding it news that we know that they will like and that will reinforce their views. And that’s sort of the Fox strategy, we know we’re going to give this audience what they’re going to respond to, but that’s also what goes on on the other side with MSNBC, CNN. And the problem with that is that it heavily incentivizes news companies to kind of demonize each other’s demographics. And there’s no incentive to really kind of play things down the middle or-balance is a word that’s become tainted in journalism. But I think it’s an important word. There’s no incentive to that because your audiences aren’t going to respond and they’re not going to stay. So what I was proposing is basically, maybe someday we’ll create a new framework that will attempt to try to figure out how to have a news business that doesn’t depend on stirring up audiences against each other, is the idea.

Rich Helppie:
I think you have a term of art. Is it called outrage center or writing to the outrage center? Is that one of your terms or is that a term of art?

Matt Taibbi:
I do use that. I’m not sure whether that’s mine or whether I plucked it from somewhere, but I definitely talk about that. I mean, that’s the idea, and I’ve worked in media for almost 30 years now, and that’s mostly what we’re doing. We all know who our audiences are and we know what they’re going to respond to. And if you work in Fox news, you know that if you do a story about some absurd, over the top, woke episode on a campus somewhere that your audience is going to go nuts about it. Same with us. When I worked for Rolling Stone and I did a story about how loopy Michele Bachmann was or whatever it was, our audiences eat that stuff up. And there’s not a whole lot of incentive to try to tone down that instinct in your audiences.

Rich Helppie:
I actually watched when you authored an objective article, but it wasn’t following the talking points of the kind of left leaning part. And boy did the knives come out. You were like The Guy and then it was, well, wait a minute, why is he writing this now? Like traitor. Maybe I’m overstating the case.

Matt Taibbi:
No, this is the thing that became very common after Trump arrived on the scene. It’s interesting, in my career, actually, one of the things that actually boosted my career early was the perception that I was willing to criticize in all directions. I did a lot of reporting after the financial crisis that was heavily critical of Democrats for their various policy failures leading up to that crisis. And at the time the journalistic consensus was well, that’s good, that’s fairness, that means that we can trust this kind of reporting. But once Trump came on the scene that fell out of favor, the idea of just sort of calling things as you see them. Suddenly that became a crime that we call false equivalency or false balance or whatever it is. And it became an accepted tenant of the profession that it’s the journalist’s responsibility to help push the audience in the correct electoral direction, which I think is not what we’re supposed to be doing, but that is now basically the hegemonic belief within the business.

Rich Helppie:
Look, I don’t think this started necessarily with Trump. And I recall the first press conference that President Obama had in the White House and the New York times reporter asked him how he was finding the job so far. And one of the questions was, what part of it was he finding most charming? I mean, you talk about hard hitting journalism. And then throughout that, they re-did it, one seventh of the economy in the healthcare bill. I, by the way, am a healthcare guy, actually read that bill start to finish and I’ve read the Medicare for All bill and I read the Clinton Care bill when that was the business I was in. So I was waiting for anybody-PBS, I don’t care, somebody-to sit down and say, here’s the healthcare financing methods we have today and here’s what’s going to change and what it’s going to mean to you. Still waiting to get that report. And people want to know what it is.
Why is it that we have this crazy patchwork? And I’ve had six people on my podcast if you count me, as a knowledgeable healthcare person coming from all different perspectives, all arrived on the same fundamental framework about what needs to be done. And it’s frankly, not that hard. And it’s frankly overdue. The people that we actually hired to do this, won’t do it-that we elect-and the people that are supposed to report on it, don’t. So I was intrigued with where this can go from here. And so when I saw the title about a new media system, my mind went to why can’t people like you be part of the-it’s now digital, but what used to be print, but the written word with some video with maybe some hyper-local reporting, which there’s quite a lot of that going on, that’s pretty good, coupled with a news summary of the day. And what’s stopping that from being formed.

Matt Taibbi:
It’s a great question because there are people talking about it. There are high profile people in journalism who are discussing the possibility of creating kind of a new corporate enterprise that would seek to do this. But the problem is, it’s not really in anybody’s interests to do it that way. You’d have to have kind of a dissenting CEO with a lot of money to spare, to pour into this new venture, who is willing to kind of buck conventional wisdom. And we have had people do that. But right now the way things are, is perfectly acceptable to most of the people who hold power in this country. If you go back and listen to George Carlin talk about this in the late two thousands, maybe 2008, and he was talking about the last thing the people who actually own this country want is a population that’s capable of critical thinking. And the way we have things now is a hyper-divided system in which everybody is basically on one team or another. And they’re so busy talking past each other and lobbing insults and threats at each other, that they don’t really think about, stop to think about, what’s going on. And you bring up healthcare. It’s a massive issue in the lives of everybody, and having covered presidential campaigns, I know from listening to both Republicans and Democrats, that people are deeply, profoundly furious about healthcare. I mean, you take your kid to an emergency room and you might walk out with a $50,000 bill just for staying overnight for a case of the croup or something like that. And if you don’t have, if you’re not covered, it can be like a crippling incident in your life. Every [cross talk].

Rich Helppie:
Worse is you think you’re covered [cross talk] that ER is in network and then you find out, wait a minute, that’s a different physician group. And the ER is covered, but the two doctors that look at your child aren’t covered. It’s an insane system.

Matt Taibbi:
There are so many things. I have friends who are doctors, so this is a personal bugbear for me. But just to take an example, you could get in a car accident, be unconscious and be helicoptered somewhere, without your consent, you never agreed to it. You’ll wake up with a $150,000 bill for a helicopter ride, and that’s not covered.

Rich Helppie:
Well, here’s the secret about that. On the admission forms, always insert that you’re liable for charges, just insert for covered in network charges. And then also when you get that bill, don’t pay it. Because it’ll wind its way through-the computer systems behind this are just absolutely horrible. And the insurance hasn’t even adjudicated the claim before it falls out and it’s slipping over to patient responsibility. But this kind of knowledge is in the country. It’s in a lot of places, but it’s not being brought any place. And if you think about a person that’s engaged in a job or a profession and they come home and they want to be a responsible citizen, what are their choices at night? ABC, NBC, CBS, all right. CNN, MSNBC, Fox. Probably missing someone there.

Matt Taibbi:
PBS.

Rich Helppie:
PBS. All kind of from the same playbook, they don’t have another alternative. And it-in the short time that we’ve been doing this podcast-we hear from both the news makers saying, I appreciate that I get time to talk about the issue, like policing-let’s go to the sheriff and in 30 seconds, tell us what we need to do about policing in the United States. It’s an impossible job. And then from the audience they’re saying, I’m not getting any information. And I’m of the mind when I hear that word about a new media, again, I go to all of the good reporting like you’re doing and the hyper-local report, and some of the better podcasts. It’s really bringing that together in a gateway. And I think a corporate structure with corporate control would not work. I think that there there’s a not-for-profit element to this. I think there’s some user pay to this. And I think there are some basically free content in this. You know when you turn on CNN you know what you’re going to get. You turn on Fox you know what you’re going to get.

Matt Taibbi:
Not to interrupt, but that tells you right there that it’s not news, because cause the news by its nature is surprising and confusing.

Rich Helppie:
And I’m trying to promote this. You can hold two thoughts in your head. We can all say, okay, Donald Trump was a terrible choice for president and he didn’t know the job. He didn’t want to learn the job. And he’s got massive personal problems, which happens to be my point of view. And at the same time, say that the FBI misbehaved, which they did. And I pointed this out to a very knowledgeable legal person. I said, look, James Comey, Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, all asked under oath in a Senate hearing-if you knew then what you know today about the contents of the FISA warrant application, would you have approved it? All three answered no. That didn’t make any of the news. In an email exchange with this very highly knowledgeable person the response back was, where’d you get that, Fox news? I said, no, C-SPAN live during the day. But the first reaction was, I don’t like that fact. You must have got it from a bad place. That really speaks to how corrupt the media world has become.

Matt Taibbi:
We’ve conditioned our audiences to, to react negatively to news that disappoints their narrative expectations. So the example that you cite, another piece of news that’s in that same vein, it came out in declassified testimony that Andrew McCabe, the Deputy FBI Director, that way back in August of 2016, they had moved on from George Papadopoulos as a target to Carter Page because he said the evidence “didn’t particularly indicate that Papadopoulos was actually communicating with any Russians”, which tells you that the entire predicate for that FBI investigation was flawed from the beginning. When that came out in the Horowitz Report, which again is not, it’s not a right wing thing, it was an Inspector General report. The headlines and all of the newspapers that had hyped this story were instead focused on the idea that the start of the investigation was legal, that it had been done without bias, but it didn’t tell us the important information that there was a problem. And that’s what happens when you behave that way, audiences see it and they stopped trusting. And that’s why we’ve had results like-there was a poll this week showing that only 46% of the country trust the media. It’s stuff like that, that contributes to the problem. Sometimes you have to just suck it up and tell people the news even if you don’t like it.

Rich Helppie:
Right. And so I was watching CNN, part of my diligence on news scanning, and they’re complaining, well, why doesn’t anybody believe us? It’s like which fake story were you flogging, do we want to use as the example? What story didn’t you actually try to get facts out on that we can use? What about your owner saying his job is to take down a certain president? It’s like, that’s why people don’t trust you. And how did they get to the arrest-we sent, I don’t know, 27 guys to arrest a 70 year old, including a helicopter, an armored vehicle, at six in the morning-come on.

Rich Helppie:
Look, people like Jeff Zucker came from the entertainment wing of the business and they understand the news as an entertainment product, which is frankly correct given the way that the business is structured. I mean, it’s morally and ethically abhorrent, but from their point of view, they’re trying to create something that they know is going to drive a lot of audience. And so, yes, they’re creating a narrative that creates villains and heroes, and Donald Trump wears the black hat and the forces in the CIA and FBI, they wear the white hats, but this is a format that’s been repeated back and forth over and over again. But it’s gotten so much worse in the Trump era. And the problem is that again, audiences see this, they want people in the news to have a sense of detachment about what they’re reporting. Like we’re not supposed to really care about what the outcomes of political events are. We’re supposed to be hyper-focused on what’s already a very difficult job of just getting things correct. And the primary preoccupation of reporters-and I know this from growing up because I have so many people who are in the business, friends are in the business-used to be this panic of getting it wrong. Like every time he did a story, you had trouble going to sleep at night because you were afraid you got something in the story wrong. And the previous generation of journalists all have that. Now they don’t, because they-we-all know that our audiences are going to forgive us if we miss a little bit, but as long as our hearts are in the right place, they’re okay with that, which is a major sign of a problem.

Rich Helppie:
And see, I think that the partisan attacks from what should be a detached objective press, actually was their undoing. Think if, just put the camera on Donald Trump. So I watched him and, remember when he did the thing about person, man, woman, camera, TV?

Matt Taibbi:
I don’t remember that. No.

Rich Helppie:
Okay. So I happened to watch that interview live. He said, well, give me this cognitive test. And you’d have to have serious brain damage not to pass this, but he went on and on. He goes, all the doctors had never seen anything like this before, they couldn’t believe it. And he went on for minutes and I was watching this going, does he really believe that? Or does he think we’re that dumb? Either one is a problem and he shouldn’t be the President of the United States. But instead what’s on the news is what did Adam Schiff cook up today or anonymous in the White House who was a senior level advisor who turned out to be a kid who probably didn’t shave every day. It’s like, what are we buying into here? CNN is saying that our old demented guy is better than Fox’s old, crazy guy. That’s the debate we’re having.

Matt Taibbi:
I think you’re right. Those narratives that were cooked up by the Schiffs of the world actually became one of the only things that sustained Trump’s ability to be politically viable across four years. It was his best card to play when he went to speak. I mean, I covered both his campaigns, this one less than the last one because of the pandemic. But when he went to crowds, that was his go-to line-was going against the media, talking about the news stories that they had drummed up against him. And because he was correct in a lot of those cases, it really resonated with a lot of people because he had solved his own accessibility problem with ordinary working class Americans, Trump being, ostensibly, a billionaire, by turning the CNNs of the world, the anchors of those programs into the class enemy. And he succeeded in doing it because they over-reached.

Rich Helppie:
And played right into his narrative.

Matt Taibbi:
Exactly. And if they hadn’t done that, the predominant thinking in our businesses is, oh, we had to do this because we had to stop him. But journalists aren’t superheroes, our job is just to tell people what’s going on. And then somebody else has to do the stopping. And we just don’t see it that way now, and that’s a problem.

Rich Helppie:
Let’s kind of zero in a little bit on solutions. So my general thesis is that we have three bad guys in the group. It’s the Republican party, it’s the Democratic party and it’s the news reporting industry. Now I refuse to call them journalists because they’re not, they’re not fulfilling the role of journalists in a free press. I believe that trying to undo Democrats or Republicans with a third party is probably futile. They’ve really cemented themselves in, but they do have great survival instincts. And I think that they will respond to enough pressure. And so similarly on news reporting, why can you keep producing garbage? Well, the answer’s very simple. People keep consuming it. So how do we get on the other side of that? Because it doesn’t take a lot to look and I don’t know how to pronounce his name correctly, but do you know the fellow Andy N-G-O?

Matt Taibbi:
Oh Andy “no”, yeah.

Rich Helppie:
And so I’ve seen a lot of his videos and things and what he’s reporting from Portland and from Seattle and so forth. And I’m like, okay, that looks bad. What date was that? What angle was that? And is there any corroboration? Because if what he’s reporting is true, it’s being really under-reported and nobody’s picking it up. And I only use him as an example, in that we need to get to a standard that this group or this ecosystem of reporting, is trying to do an honest fair job.

Matt Taibbi:
So he’s an interesting case. There was an episode yesterday that really brought out the weirdness around that. He tweeted out an interesting piece of information, which was that Twitter had just shut down a series of accounts, ostensibly connected to Antifa. That was an interesting piece of news because a lot of people on the progressive left have been cheering a lot of the censorship and speech suppression, because they think it’s only going to impact their political opponents. A few reporters who, Blake [inaudible] myself, we kind of retweeted that information. And the immediate reaction was to pile on because, oh, you retweeted and Andy Ngo who’s a fascist or whatever it is. Right. I actually don’t follow Andy all that well, I know of him. But this is a pretty common phenomenon now in media. It’s well, we’re not going to cover an issue, but if you actually consume any coverage by the person who does pay attention to the issue, we’re going to denounce you for doing that. So, and it’s similar to the phenomenon of Glenn Greenwald-doesn’t get invited on CNN, MSNBC, any of those channels, he’s been kind of like a lot of reporters, kind of blackballed from those kinds of invitations, but then he goes on Fox News and they go get on his case for going on Fox. Pick one or the other, like either examine the issues yourself or demonize the person. But they don’t do either. So it’s a long way of saying the issues that Andy Ngo is looking at, which are like Antifa protests or whatever, the only real coverage of that has been basically to dismiss the idea that it exists. I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I think it’s totally fine to do reports that say, well, this is a real phenomenon. I don’t know how big or dangerous it is, but let’s look at it, and they’re not doing that. And that just lends more and more credence to, probably, his audience.

Rich Helppie:
That specific topic. We do know there are things going on. I want to know, okay, who are these people? Who’s equipping you? How did you know to show up there at that time? Why did you employ the tactics? What do you hope to achieve? Basic questions, right? And then people can either reject that particular movement or they can join it. But this notion that it doesn’t exist is nonsense, because we can see it. And even Ted Wheeler, Mayor of Portland, after months of denying it said, yeah, there’s Antifa and anarchists in our city and they’re a problem. A little slow on the uptake, okay, but he got there.

Matt Taibbi:
And there were demonstrations on an Inauguration Day in Portland, it wasn’t like wide-scale violence, but there were a couple of businesses that had their windows smashed and that got some headlines. You can’t say, it’s not, there’s nothing there. There clearly was significant amount of unrest this summer. And again, from a news perspective, you don’t have to have a take on it. You just have to go and document it. And this was the problem that I think was pervasive during the summer protests about police brutality. And again, I wrote two books about police brutality. It’s like an important issue to me. But the idea of…

Rich Helppie:
What are the titles of those books? And just talk, our audience would love to hear about it.

Matt Taibbi:
I wrote a book called I Can’t Breathe about the killing of Eric Garner. And I wrote a book called The Divide, which is sort of about the difference between how white collar criminals and street criminals are prosecuted. And so I did a lot of work on street policing, stop and frisk, community policing techniques and how they’ve changed over the years. All kinds of horrific stuff that we could get into if you wanted.
But the point is I get a lot of what the protesters were being upset about over the summer. I was in tune with all of that stuff, but you can’t say that there was no disruption whatsoever. I mean, there were communities where there were elderly people who couldn’t get their medication because the local pharmacy had been destroyed, there were small businesses that were disrupted. You can’t just whitewash that out and say, it didn’t happen. You have to document it. There was kind of a movement within a lot of the newsrooms to say, well, let’s not do that story because it’ll give credence to the idea that this movement is not righteous or whatever it is. It’s not our job to make that determination. That’s what worried me.

Rich Helppie:
Look, 500 people go and loot a Target store. That’s the story. What happened to the Target store? And the Nader for me was in Chicago during one of the mostly peaceful protests, as they’ve been captioned, they smashed the windows in the Ronald McDonald house-just one function, take care of the families of kids that are really, really ill and while they’re getting care. And I couldn’t get anybody on the left to denounce that at all. And as I’m watching my friends on the right, my friends on the left, divide over-I said something to the effect that I thought that the president deserved impeachment on the second impeachment, in my humble opinion, I think he violated his oath of office, he did it over a period of months. And talk show hosts probably shouldn’t do that, a candidate definitely shouldn’t, and a president, never, period. And that’s going to get adjudicated, I’m happy to see it get adjudicated, but at the same time, I said, look, if you were one of the people flogging these fake stories, just to your point earlier about that gave Trump cover, I just said, kindly STFU and spare me the pearl clutching if you were condoning fiery arson over the summer. Arson is not good arson or bad arson. And if you think about the reporting that went around the mayors of Olympia, Seattle and Portland, they were peaceful demonstrations, summers of love until they came into their neighborhoods and their front yards. Then they were rioters and criminals, right?

Matt Taibbi:
There are like sort of match sets of stories with completely different approaches. So in September Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, sort of suggested that he might start prosecuting the people behind the CHAZ zone, or whatever they call it, in Seattle for sedition. And that word sedition triggered this sort of avalanche of-one friend of mine calls-“agastitude” among a lot of the pundits class because, what an incredibly powerful and non-specific governmental prosecutorial tool they’re going to unsheathe to go after these protesters. Like that’s a tool that should be handled with care, it’s a word that you shouldn’t use except in the most extreme of circumstances. In the Capitol riot I actually understand the use of it with respect to certain people involved in that fiasco. But within a couple of days, it was being expanded to cover, not just Trump, but anybody who’d ever voted for Trump. An exactly opposite reaction. If you’re supposed to be careful with the word the first time around, we should be careful with it the second time around. Again, it’s a different approach to the job. It’s more about the people we’re covering as opposed to the principles that we’re covering.

Rich Helppie:
The attack on the voters or the other candidate, that was the big thing that struck me in 2016 when Hillary Clinton went after-and this was a prepared line by the way-Trump’s voters. And you stand in the public square as a candidate, you’re going to get attacked fairly and unfairly. Guess what, that comes with the territory, buck up, you got to deal with this. But when the attacks started going against the actual citizenry, I think that’s where we broke through. And I think it launched this like competitive virtue signaling that you see on all kinds of media that, hey, I think better than you, therefore I’m better than you. Because I compare certain lines and then the media started flogging that. If you look at the arc of things like the Duke lacrosse case, the UVA rapist, where Obama was born, the-I don’t know-obviously lying Christine Blasey Ford, the whoppers that Trump would tell and have echoed throughout the right wing media, does this all link together and how do we get out of this?

Matt Taibbi:
I do think it’s linked because the regulatory framework, the thing that’s designed to prevent the spread of falsehoods, is accountability to your audience. But when you have a divided audience, your own audience doesn’t care if you screw up in the other direction. So when Trump talks about how they stole the election, or there were 3 million undocumented people who voted for Hillary Clinton or whatever it was, his audiences probably don’t care that it’s not true. So those things get to circulate over and over again. And it’s an echo chamber that just continues echoing because that’s the nature of these things. But the same phenomenon goes on the other side. If you tell a story about Trump being like a literal agent for a Vladimir Putin, or that the it’s the beginning of the end of his presidency, and then we can expect indictments, which is what we were told on the middle of March, 2018. And then that doesn’t happen. The reason we can do that is because our audiences don’t particularly care-they’re forgiving. And that’s a feature now of media on both on both sides.

Rich Helppie:
There are people that still hung on to-there’s still people that accuse Trump-of being pro-Russian. And I remember when that story first broke, I said, hmm, here’s a guy in his seventies, in the public eye most of his adult life. And he decided, I think I’m going to run for president and let’s see, oh, Russians are the way to go. I said, look, I’m willing to hear the facts. And during the whole Mueller investigation, when the left and many of my friends on the left were frothing at the mouth and saying, oh, we’re going to get this guy, and the little crawlers are going to the bottom, the left wing media saying, breaking news, Trump, the walls are closing in, the end is near. And I just said, well, I said, with the investigative resources, the money, the time, unprecedented access, including breach of client attorney privilege that Robert Mueller has, I said, if there’s something there, they’re going to find it. And I’m content to wait for the report to come out. And the report comes out. It’s like never mind, but we might have some process crimes. It wouldn’t have existed had we not done it, right? But because the accusation was made that stink is going to be out there forever.

Matt Taibbi:
It was very conspicuous that the entire Russiagate story was absent from all of the autopsies of the 2020 election. It was like it never happened. I mean, I lived in Russia for 11 years and the Sovietness of our approach to memory now is just striking, like this was the biggest issue in the Trump presidency for three years. He was dogged by these accusations constantly. And did they have an effect on him? Did they have an effect on the country? What was the impact of that story on the national psyche? Nothing. It’s a non-issue, it’s like it’s been erased. And this is a new tendency in American media.
We’ve seen a recent example just a couple of weeks ago, we were told to expect armed demonstrations in all 50 capitols, and FBI leaked reports to all the major news agencies. They said there was a memo telling us to expect a massive uprising and it doesn’t materialize. Okay, fine. It’s fine to say, well, maybe they were deterred by the show of force, whatever it is, but they didn’t even do that. They didn’t even address it. It’s psychologically damaging to audiences to constantly hype up threats and then just pretend they didn’t happen or that the experience of being threatened never happened. And that’s what we’re doing to people.

Rich Helppie:
That, to me, is one of the biggest crimes that we have in the media today, it’s all about alarmism and threatening so that it stays there. In your earlier career were you ever kind of directed to do that? Like, we’ve got to write something provocative because we need eyeballs or we need clicks or whatever. How were you getting measured as a reporter?

Matt Taibbi:
It doesn’t really work like that. Have you ever read Noam Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent? I’ve read as a teenager. It’s really interesting because he’s never worked in the media but he gets a lot of it right. Like reporters kind of are trained to internalize the values of their business. And so you just kind of learn by the way that your editors react to certain things that they’re going to like some stories and they’re not going to like other things. And so by the time you’re old enough to be doing front-page stories you’ve already been trained internally to recognize that this is a story and that’s not a story. And I really, really tried hard to break out of that mold in my career. In fact, one of the things that I really worked hard to do, was to try to popularize things that most people consider boring, like explaining what a subprime mortgage fraud case looked like or things like that. So you take something that people don’t really want to deal with and you have to work extra hard to make it interesting. Most of the time we have the opposite incentive. And especially nowadays when you can quantify so exactly what’s going on with your audiences, whether you’re working on a platform like Substack, like I do now, or whether you work at the New York times, you know how many people are reading, you know where they’re coming from, what sites they’re visiting through, how they learn about your story. And so you’re heavily incentivized to make things more sensational or to appeal to certain audiences. And it’s a difficult thing to navigate.

Rich Helppie:
My brand promise is that every listener will find something to not like in every one of my episodes. And so I tell people, if you’re going to come here expecting to get affirmation-don’t, you know where to go for that, but I’m going to be equally strong, and as factual as I can be on everyone. And I actually wrote a little thing called Holding Two Thoughts in Your Head, that people think things are all one way and they’re not. And I think this gets us to the polarization of politics, where we have people clamoring for Medicare for All and they don’t understand. What that bill basically says is the secretary of HHS controls every penny of healthcare spent with no guard rails, period. That’s what’s in the bill. So it’s not Medicare. It’s just a massive control of healthcare resources. That’s what’s in the bill, I’ve read it.
When we look at things-firearms, we have 320 million firearms in private hands. And of course the framers put the second amendment there because they were afraid at some point in time, people couldn’t go hunting with guns, they just gotten back from a hunting trip. But you’re not going to take 300 million firearms out of the country. But at the same time, there’s people who shouldn’t have them. And so I suggested a graduated licensing plan for firearms. Just like we don’t let a first-time pilot jump in this seat of a 747-we just don’t do it. Yet in some states, an 18 year old can go into a gun shop, buy an automatic rifle and buy a thousand rounds of ammunition, walk out. That you can’t tell me the person behind the counter doesn’t have some hint that that’s a problem.
You look at student debt, which frankly, is loan sharking because your balance goes up just like loan sharks do, and who benefits. And if you look around and you say, there’s a university with billions of dollars in an endowment, and they’re soliciting students to come here to improve their future, at the same time knowing they’re laying so much debt on them, that they are imperiling their future. I mean, it’s a moral outrage and the beneficiaries are universities that are piling up these massive, billions and billions of dollars in endowment, and impoverishing kids. We need to get after that. But where’s the story about that?

Matt Taibbi:
It’s difficult because, and I’ve written a bunch of student loan stories, the problem with that, as with a lot of other narratives, is that we tend to sort of commoditize issues and simplify them for audiences. So you take the gun issue, there’s pro-gun stories, there’s anti-gun stories. There’s not a whole lot of, well, let’s look holistically at the whole thing and try to figure out a way that we can address some of these issues step-by-step. That kind of approach is just absent from media. With student loans, you’re either deemed pro-student or anti-student, so even though it’s very clear that the hyper-availability of government debt is actually a significant driver of the increase in tuition costs, which is part of the reason that this whole crisis has snowballed so much, it’s like a vicious cycle. Like everybody has to go to college. Everybody can get debt. The universities know it. They keep jacking up prices. And now where it’s outstripping inflation, people will interpret any kind of idea of well, maybe we should do something about making government loans maybe less easily available. Then that’s being against social mobility or whatever it is. So there’s a tendency to try drive the nuance out of coverage. Trump was another example. You talked about Hillary’s deplorables comment. I covered Trump and I interviewed a lot of his supporters. And there were definitely, definitely without question, people at his events who freaked me out, who were unquestionably like racist and said things that were shocking to me. I hadn’t heard an American in a while. And then I went two rows down, I would interview some 60 year old grandmother who’s like, I loved his reality show. And they were completely out to lunch in a different way. Like I would ask the question, what is liking him in a reality show have to do with his fitness for the presidency? And there’s just nothing there. Those are two completely different phenomena, but even that is too complicated for the press. Like you talk about two thoughts, there were hundreds of weird reasons why people voted for Trump, but they reduced it all down to one or two, in the process I think they missed a lot that was important. So, I totally understand what you’re saying.

Rich Helppie:
And well, I think a lot of Trump’s vote was anti-Hillary vote.

Matt Taibbi:
Oh, of course, of course.

Rich Helppie:
I vote in a swing state, Michigan, and we were bombarded with two negative Hillary attack ads by Hillary Clinton. Every single commercial break, you got one or the other. And then about every, I don’t know, 10 or 15 times it would be a Trump ad talking about restarting factories and the like. I don’t know who was advising Hillary Clinton to not do a ground game. And I don’t know who was advising her to bring up the Billy Bush tape because I can tell you there were Democrat women, staunch Democrats-I won’t vote for her, because she slut-shamed a 23 year old and defended a serial sexual abuser. And I was asked on things, how would I advise the Democratic party? I said, I would tell Hillary to pick out one thing that she’s done, that has benefited other people and I would just hammer that home, give people a place to go. Never came up with anything that she had done for other people. And Trump rode that. So he never had to have people face the full reality of a guy who’s executive talents is all about by the seat of his pants. He roars a lot, but he doesn’t follow through. And so then they come up with well, he colluded with Russia. And I’m like, I don’t think this guy is organized enough to collude with anybody. He’d have to like, stay on a plan for a period of time.

Matt Taibbi:
I don’t think more than eight seconds.

Rich Helppie:
I don’t think he has the attention span to collude with anybody. And I think he’d be dumb enough if he thought it would move his approval rating up or get him attention, he’d talk about it on national TV.

Matt Taibbi:
Right. I’ve got a great-look at what a great deal I’ve got.

Rich Helppie:
I exactly right, I pulled one off on you. So we move to 2020 and the Democrats are coming downstream and it looks like Bernie Sanders is probably going to get the nomination and they go, we can’t have that, so we get everybody to drop off. And so we’re going to settle on Joe. So Clyburn steps in and Joe gets the nomination because he’s like, okay Joe, don’t be Bernie. And then Joe goes in the general and he’s like, what’s our plan? You’re not Trump. So my advice to Joe Biden is don’t be Bernie, don’t be Trump and you’ll be fine. Matt, why can’t we, or let me try this a different way. If we wanted to engineer a better media, what would the building blocks of that be?

Matt Taibbi:
I think we’re headed in that direction anyway. The one thing that I worry about that’s a major wildcard in all this is this new sort of Silicon Valley consolidation and effort at censorship, because it’s heavily directed at emphasizing what they call authority. Like Google’s whole plan for how it ranks and D-ranks content is based on this standard of what they call authority. In order for a new system to emerge it’s going to have to be experimental first. There’s going to have to be a sort of a vibrant alternative media culture. That kind of culture could easily be artificially suppressed in this new environment. And that worries me. But absent that, I think really, it’s just going to take somebody recognizing that there’s a huge commercial opportunity out there. Because there’s a massive audience of people who are disaffected and they’re both on the left and the right. They don’t believe even the basics of what they’re being told on whether it’s Fox or CNN. It doesn’t matter. So just create a channel that, I would say, start with just a basic newscast that checks its facts, worries about getting stuff right. And make some kind of an effort to pick its stories based on issues that actually matter to ordinary people. The emphasis in the last, especially in the last four or five years, has been to focus heavily on issues that are of primary concern to people within the beltway. Like the Russia issue, nobody cared about it. Like when they actually did surveys about it, they said, what’s your most important issue? Like it was less than 1% of people said the Russia thing. But people cared a lot about it inside Washington. So if they base things around healthcare care, student debt, childcare, educational quality, nutrition, opiate addiction, all these things that people are really worried about, they’re really freaked out about. If they did that I think they would do really well, but they’re not doing that yet.

Rich Helppie:
Well, to your point, if you control Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and if you really want to extend it-Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, you could literally control the world. I had a guest on my podcast, professor Daniel Crane from University of Michigan Law school. And he’s also still a practicing attorney in antitrust. And he’s written some papers about how Hitler was able to rise to power because of the monopolies or duopolies in a pre-war Germany. He had control two chemical companies, two aircraft companies and he did, and he compromised them, and he was able to direct them into this war effort. And I am hearing a muting of voices on the left based on the muzzling of Trump and the shutdown of Parler and such. And I’ve never been on Parler. I mean, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is other than a libertarian Twitter, I guess, is what it is. But giving that much power to those few people is a bad thing. And the irony of this, is that most of those companies, they were spawned based on an anti-trust ruling that broke up AT&T and a consent decree that limited IBM. And again, this is where good reporting would come in. Google is way past due to be broken up into multiple companies. They are in huge need of being broken up.

Matt Taibbi:
You add the media element to that and it’s a very frightening picture. There’s a shocking lack of concern of this issue among people whose livelihood involves the transmission of information. I grew up in the eighties when people freaked out like it was a national emergency when Tipper Gore wanted to put labels on rock albums. And now the CEOs of Twitter and Google, and they’re just zapping accounts left and right and nobody cares. And it should be a huge issue in the press because this is it’s clearly something that’s going to be directed, or already is being directed at us. It’s very strange that there’s no uproar about this or no fear about how it’s going to be employed. The incident with the New York Post expose on Hunter Biden, which I didn’t think was terribly important of a story, but to suppress it was a huge deal, and reporters should’ve been freaked out about it and they weren’t at all, which is very worrying.

Rich Helppie:
Great example. And the suppression of it made it more like, why don’t they want this out? I thought the tale about how the laptop got to the FBI was far fetched, you took three of them in there. Although there was no denial from anybody about that, whether the emails were authentic or not. So somebody needs to get in there and go, okay, the emails are good, but that’s not how they got out into the public sphere, at all. Or the emails are bogus and the whole story is terrible.

Matt Taibbi:
It appears they weren’t bogus and you’re right. I think the story about how they came out was unsatisfactory, for sure. So the unilateral idea that yes, we should just suppress that story, it’s like, why? It’s so crazy that people were for that in our business. It was shocking to me.

Rich Helppie:
Well, the first test case, I think, of making a non-person-and you lived in, was it Soviet Russia at the time?

Matt Taibbi:
I went to school for a year in the Soviet Union and then after that it was Russia.

Rich Helppie:
So making a person a non-person-and Alex Jones, who is an idiot and an inflammatory guy, but simultaneously taking him off of every major platform. And I looked at that and I said, well, not really disappointed to see him go, but boy does that speak to the power and kind of getting it dialed in. So frankly, you or me, any of us, could be knocked off, could be made a non-person and then, well, what’s the next step? Well, JP Morgan and Bank of America, Comerica Bank, they don’t want you to be a card [inaudible]. And think about that, that there’s a lot of power being consolidated in a few places, and we don’t have that traditional role of journalism. And so when I read your writing about the narrative first, and then let’s go get a story and drop it into the narrative versus let’s go and find out where the facts take us and write it no matter who’s ox being gored. I really feel strongly we need to get back to that. I do think there’s an appetite for that in the country. I do think there’s an appetite for balance and plain speaking.
The police chief in the city of Detroit, great guy, he would-talk about pearl clutching-there was series of home invasions in the Southwest side of Detroit where the home invaders were shot by the homeowners. And his basic attitude was, look, we can’t be every place all the time and so we’re pretty happy about this. And it was like, wait, you can’t say that. It’s like, well, actually we can. And so he’s a good guy, democratic guy in a very democrat city, but he’s trying to keep people alive and keep the bad guys out of your house. But he was breaking from doctrine that guns are bad, and they are bad misused, but they are also a tool and we have to get to that kind of discussion.
Matt, I hope that you will continue to be bold. I hope you’ll continue to be successful. Write more books, write more articles. I’d be delighted to share more of your work here. And perhaps we can think this through, about becoming part of, or helping support, a turn in journalism back to the very important role that the framers had in mind.

Matt Taibbi:
Oh, well, thank you, Rich. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Rich Helppie:
Is there anything that we didn’t cover today that you think that we should have?

Matt Taibbi:
I think we hit most of the key points, so that’s cool.

Rich Helppie:
Let me make this an official sign-off. This is Rich Helppie with our special guest, Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone and author of many other publications, look him up on Substack. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. He is a factual guy, and he’s not trying to win your approval. He’s just trying to do a great job as a journalist. This is Rich Helppie signing off the Common Bridge.

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