What Happened to Matt Taibbi?
nymag.com
nymag.com
I have read his work as well and I see very little overall change in his professional work.
All while basically all coverage had this angle! Even (especially) from the “precious liberal media” like the times and the Washington post. But of course people Taibbi know complained about this, and he didn’t like it.
The conservative mindset is not satisfied just by winning on the fundamentals. They must have everyone also like them as well. This explains the whining by Taibbi, the packed room of multi-millionaires to billionaires to listen to Bari Weiss talk about cancel culture, and to pg tweeting about how rich people are under attack because people dare to not like him.
Given that this is a mindset basically focused around being liked, it would be nice to say “social media caused this” but this has probably been around for much longer.
It's nearly impossible to analyze this because each person can point to their personally curated news feed and "prove" any sort of bias. If you listen to a lot of Chapo Trap House, you are getting one view. If you listen to a lot of Daily Wire you are getting another. The point here is how the big, mainstream, corporate news rooms reacted to the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. You can show the editorial decisions to not use the word "rioter" or "looter" in favor of "protester". You can see how many of them gave air time to radical left-wing positions such as "In Defense of Looting"[0]. My personal read of the situation lines up with Matt Taibbi's. Basically, you had to publicly show support for all BLM riots/protests or risk losing your reputation or job.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
Fox News is hiring, OAN is hiring. And hell, if you’re an opinion writer you could get away with a bunch of factual flexibility at the Times as well.
Yeah Code Switch covered a book release covering a way of describing the issue one way. Do we need to dig up all the air time given to people who thought cops should start “applying the law”?
I do agree that establishing what the “real bias” was is hard. But Taibbi is just wrong on this. Like Weiss, they are confounding “people will yell at me” with “I will lose my job”, and confounding that with “I will not be able to practice journalism”.
Weiss tried to get a professor fired, her anti-cancel culture screeds are disingenuous
What are you referring to here?
Gold star for framing there!
Your tell was referring to all of that as BLM riots vs BLM protests. The protests themselves were by definition virtuous (a first amendment action at its core), whereas the riots were an ugly aftermath of that.
If those riots bother you, are you bothered by the fact that outside agitators might have fanned the flames? Case in point: https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/06/02/whats-up-with-umbre...
This was absolutely the case, as clip after clip showed umbrella man and others performing and inciting vandalism and chaos. Meanwhile, actual protestors were pleading with them to stop or directly intervening to stop them.
In each case, the instigators were young, white and frequently dressed in all black. Early arrestees matched this description and were frequently from out of town.
There was absolutely an infiltration/false flag operation. It amazes me how little this has been covered and how successful they were at establishing their narrative, even while so obvious.
Likewise, I'm amazed by how "Antifa" magically materializes at such opportune times for driving certain political narratives, then disappears again, yet there's very little questioning as to who these anonymous people really are. Instead, media and others just accept that they are who they say and assign them to a political "side".
It's bogeyman story telling all over again, and depressingly effective.
Indeed. It's an efficient engine by now: create fear of other; convert to anger; implant puppeteers' bidding; repeat.
In fact, they've been so effective at instilling a persistent, generalized fear, they can skip straight to the anger/action step.
The creation of Team Red v. Team Blue was a masterstroke of political manipulation, cementing American society into a never-ending genteel gang war.
And again, there was documented subterfuge to provoke these riots -- but according to you "it's all fair play"?
What I see reported about the anti-mask/vaccine protests are about as neutral as one could hope for such a crowd.
Let's see, one side is asking for the police to refrain from abuse of power and the other is people who don't want to take simple steps to help mitigate a pandemic. Hmmmmmm.....
The conservative persecution complex is a hell of a drug.
Reporting on lockdown/mask/covid protests has been so egregious and lopsided as to put Poe's Law to the test. Peacefully protesting business closures and weird, shifting mitigation mandates are apparently the worst kind of racist (journos' favorite smear). [1][2] If by "simple steps" you mean people losing their jobs because they can't Zoom into work from their pajamas or the "simple step" of showing medical papers to get sushi or the "simple step" of not seeing a dying loved one because of a bonkers government covid policy -- we might have different ideas of simple.
I'm not conservative, so the persecution complex insult doesn't really work on me, but I agree. Partisans love to feel persecuted because it gives them a sense of purpose. Conservatives are full of hypocrisy, just like liberals. But leftists and liberals are certainly not against abuses of power. They simply want state power to come down on political enemies in the right-wing.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/08/trump-sent-...
[1] https://www.salon.com/2020/05/04/anti-lockdown-movement-powe...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/anti-lockd...
Of course to not fall into the same trap of an reactionary echo chamber, I will still listen to the arguments itself, but I would lie if I said it doesn't already convey a bonus.
The tell-tale sign with these types is the rank hypocrisy. They reserve the harshest criticism for some, while giving others a pass or even endorsement for similar behavior.
They preen as if they are objectively above it all, while revealing their agenda with every word from their pens and mouths.
https://nymag.com/press/2019/09/vox-media-and-new-york-media...
He's fine
The saddest thing is that there's no way it's going to get better, only worse.