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Comment by circumvent123 | Hacker News Reader

"If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences"

Isn't culture war 95% of what Taibbi writes about?

This isn't the worst diagnosis I've read, but I don't see him offering any solutions.

It's what he writes about now, and I find his take on this somewhat disingenuous given that he's positioned himself as the "a pox on both your houses" guy and is making that his bread and butter. Given that, there really isn't any reason he'd want to solve this problem. I've followed him since the "vampire squid" days and enjoy his writing, but he's clearly toned down the gonzo style and largely dropped his coverage on the excesses of Wall Street, which have gotten worse if anything but which I guess don't get a lot of traction with most of the public.

You have to write what sells. It's not like there weren't news organizations that followed the old impartial model as best they could, like McClatchy - who went bankrupt continuing to do it. The real issue is that the public wants the entertainment of blood sport in every venue, from e-celeb beefs to politics and because the barriers to entry are so low now, if you don't hot-take it, the next Youtuber will.

Taibbi is a reporter and a commentator, not an innovator or a leader. The latter two are who we are relying upon to find solutions. At least Taibbi is one of the few remaining journalists doing their job.

Who else is on your short list? I sometimes say that Ronan Farrow is America's last reporter, but of course there must be more than one.

I'd include Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton on the list.

I want to say Glenn Greenwald too, especially for the stuff he did several years ago, but he and Taibbi are sort of occupying the same lane now. I hope he can escape the tomb that "The Intercept" became for him; he should have quit them much earlier.

I just glanced at Ben Norton's feed which I've never read before, and "The world's largest systematic violator of human rights (by far), the US government" doesn't exactly leave a glaringly good first impression of dispassionate analysis.

It is still pretty much true, so probably that says more about you that about him

Maybe!

Larger than, say, China, with what they're doing to the Uighurs? That's a rather large claim...

When China is routinely posting "smiley happy genocide" stories to Twitter (check @ChineseEmbinUS if you want to feel ill for some reason), someone calling out the US as uniquely evil means they are either uninformed or deliberately lying.

Absolutely call out the US for the bullshit it does, but whitewashing other countries actions to promote your viewpoint is abhorrent.

I live here in USA. I'd like to think I and my many fellow pacifists can do something about our behavior. I have zero effect on China, and most of their more recent supposed misdeeds are straight-up propaganda bullshit anyway. Compare their methods in Africa with ours. We send in AFRICOM, flood the zone with weapons and ammunition, undermine and eventually murder any democratically-elected leader who supports socialism on the level of e.g. Germany, etc. The Chinese hire locals to build factories and then they hire and train more locals to work in those factories.

Any time I hear the word "abhorrent" I think of all the Native Americans, enslaved Africans, Filipinos, Guatemalans, Colombians, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Afghans, etc. whose lives were ground up in the gristmill of USA capitalism.

> I hope he can escape the tomb that "The Intercept" became for him; he should have quit them much earlier.

He left Intercept 2 months ago. He has a substack newsletter now

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

Glenn Greenwald either one of the most-easily-fooled people in history, or one of the most dishonest. The man is never right about anything. He's wrong about whether water is wet. This tweet being the perfect example.

https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457

That tweet isn't Greenwald; it's an ankle-biter wittily captioning "LOL" a non-linked picture that he apparently copy-pasted all by himself. The first half of the picture is a shot of Greenwald's perfectly factual tweet. [0] The second half is another non-linked shot of another tweet, this one composed by a Twitter user somehow skilled enough to actually link to a gizmodo piece. Examining that, one discovers that the fancy satellite picture is actually an "artist's conception". (Another clue might have been the perfectly regular grid that the parler users were supposedly creating.) The only actual reference to actual locations is the caption "@donk_enby later shared a screenshot showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in latitude and longitude." [1] Once again, this caption is on a picture without a link. However, if one actually types the pictured coordinates into a map app, one discovers that the hypothetical parler user was terrorizing a general store in Delaware. [2] Hey, they got the timezone right: the Delaware coast isn't that far from DC!

In general, rabble-rousers on the internet don't link to original data, because "easily-fooled people" like yourself will just believe your first impression. And helpfully share that with HN!

[0] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348322148704804864

[1] https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...

[2] https://goo.gl/maps/jkTzy46xqPCmsmwn6

Greenwald's the only for-sure other. Yascha Mounk also seems to have his head screwed on straight but isn't a journalist per se. I was hoping Isaac Saul was another diamond in the rough but he ended up going off the deep end, as so many others have.

Both Taibbi and Greenwald have disgraced and discredited themselves in the Trump era by publishing a parade of disingenuous nonsense, carrying water for Putin and Trump, and slandering truth tellers. It has been sad to watch them slide so far.

There is a reason that both are now self publishing their punditry without editors or fact checkers. I wouldn't really even call it journalism anymore. Neither can still be compared to Ronan Farrow, who is meticulously honest.

That's just like, your opinion man. If you want to defend it, feel free. But for the unconvinced it just reads like a person who isn't listening to them.

Thank you for demonstrating the entire problem is such a concise and recognisable way.

I've followed Isaac Saul for months now and have been consistently impressed with his daily coverage. What did he do to lose you?

When he started debunking the voter fraud claims, he had a voice of objectivity. Over time, it seemed to me he just presumed bad faith on the other side (which is fair) but then started the usual "mind reading" bits where he would start claiming he knew the motives of individuals saying certain things, based upon that assumption of bad faith. When someone says "so-and-so says X, but they're doing it because of motive Y" then I don't consider that person a journalist anymore, just a commentator.

There are plenty, but many work without recognition. And these days it's probably safer that way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/business/media/ronan-farr...

Is there a punch line? The NYT is so bad that I unsubscribed and now I can’t read any of it.

From what I’ve read of Taibbi’s work he’s the last guy interested in stoking any kind of culture war - but he does a very good job of both analyzing how it’s been developing and predicting how the end game will work out.

Is he a derivative of that?

He’s covering - his beat is - the current media’s stoking of culture war as a commercial reality of modern media tech.

To a certain extent he owns that at the end; even saying that substack cannot solve this problem.

I'd say he is reporting on culture wars, not selling them.

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