1. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-t...
This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the government contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach.
Per SCOTUS, working through an intermediary is not a loophole around the First Amendment. For purposes of regulating free speech, a government contractor IS the government.
So yes, in hundreds of tweets and articles reporting the Twitter Files, there were a couple errors that Taibbi instantly corrected. That's how you build trust and integrity with readers. It's what MSNBC, CNN, and FOX almost never do.
Video of the full hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMDjfP1gk60
In what way? He asserts it was a mistake and even your (obviously non-objective) citation doesn't assert that it was anything other than a mistake.
when you say "among" do you have other examples? or if this is your only example can you explain why "It's clear that was not a mistake"
If it makes you feel better, you can see it as a prominent and controversial journalist on a high-profile story making a number of elementary but significant errors that just happened to support his preferred view, instead of him deliberately misrepresenting facts to push an agenda, but neither interpretation does a anything good for his credibility as a journalist.
Regardless of if they were mistakes or not, there is more than enough found in the Twitter Files to be concerned about. It would have been much more interesting to hear Medhi discuss the substance of Tabbi's work. Instead he tried to discredit everything by cornering him on air with small details that Taibbi clearly wasn't prepared to fact check live.
Given the timeline of events in reporting on the Twitter Files, it seems likely that Taibbi et al were working long hours, digging through thousands of emails and messages, trying to piece together what was happening at Twitter over the previous 4 years. Typing one letter wrong in an acronym, among hundreds of acronyms they had been seeing in emails, doesn't surprise me. They were essentially live tweeting their research.
Also, Taibbi and others responded to this claim that he exaggerated the 3000 tweets as 22 million tweets. https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644111356709289993. It was not 3000 tweets but rather 3000 URLs that they targeted for removal by removing any tweets containing those URLs. Seems like many reporters are making mistakes to support their preferred claim here.
There was also an incident a couple months ago where Elon Musk accused Taibbi of working for Substack, which he denied, but in leaked texts says they "originally hired" him[1], which I find confusing.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/substack/company_fin...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/10/elon-musk-...
FFS this is like claiming you are funded by BoA or JPM if your salary is deposited there.
They are literally paid by their subscribers, Substack is a mere payment & publication tool. Substack do not pay them.
Moreover w.r.t. Taibbi he has picked fights with his employers and quit at the first hint of them trying to influence his work. His credibility on that front is actually excellent and better than anyone at the NYT, for example (Who may be excellent but can't point to a history like that).
"When we started Substack in mid-2017, the future for writers was frightening. [...] We started experimenting with advances, paying a small number of writers sums ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 to cover them for a few months as they got established on Substack. [...] With Substack Pro, we pay a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform. [...] In return for that financial security, a Pro writer agrees to let Substack keep 85% of the subscription revenue in that first year."
If we're discussing Freddy De Boer this is relevant. He was on that deal. Which they won't renew and can't easily withdraw fwiw. Kinda different to being fired by Rupert Murdoch. Or having your story spiked, when it was 100% true but went against "the narrative" when that narrative was also false.
Do you have evidence that Taibbi is on this deal and has lied about it? Because that's a huge claim to make.
Carry on.
You can make the case that because Substack writers do not have an editorial process and fact checking that it is distinct from other news outlets and you'd be correct, but it doesn't change the fact that it is a platform that billionaire(s) have a financial interest in.
If substack the company don't like his writing and try /anything/ at all, he takes _his_ business away from substack. Substack work for Taibbi. Taibbi is the customer. Substack have as much influence on the stories he reports as your bank rep does on your work. Substack's owners are wholly irrelevant.
The point is that Substack is completely, totally and utterly beside the point when it comes to journalistic influence & integrity. It's unclear to me how you are missing this point. The ownership of substack has zero relevance here. None. As opposed the ownership of the WSJ and Fox News (or msnbc, cnn, nyt, etc) which clearly and obviously is extremely relevant to the output of any journalist /employed/ by those companies.
There is no credible claim of substack trying to influence writers. Unsurprisingly substack is used by wonderful journalists and idiotic charlatans alike.
Glenn Greenwald has left substack for locals for his own reasons, i don't think he has any argument with substack. Seems to have been frictionless including transfer of subscriber credit from one platform to another.
You subscribe to the NYT or WSJ you use whatever payment gateway they set up and you read content using whatever CMS they employ.
You don't subscribe to substack it isn't possible.
You subscribe to say Racket (which is Taibbi) or separately Shellenberger and use whatever payment gateway they each seperatly set up and you read content using whatever CMS they employ. Substack is a service provider and one they can easily leave as Glenn Greenwald has in the shift of his news service to locals and rumble.
So with this information you can start making better arguments.
Just admit it's not a perfect thing, just another flawed alternative.
>The claim that the funding doesn't come from a "billionaire owned outlet" doesn't really track if you look at the investors[0] in Substack.
That's your claim to which I objected. It is nonsense. Your linked article above is ridiculous and has /nothing/ whatever to do with that claim. Don't admit it, just acknowledge you got it totally wrong. Easy.
I look at Taibbi's work and haven't found uncorrected error. NYT? WaPo? Well it's not fair, there are orders of magnitude more opportunities for them to mess it up but yep, they sure have, often, on stories Taibbi didn't.
Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.
Step two is recognizing that the other guys are more than happy to lie to you too, or lie to themselves, and have an even easier time of it due to lack of vetting.
It is a terrible side-effect of doing things like teaching kids in the 80s and 90s that marijuana was a terrible drug because when they find out it isn't, then everything else they said is suspect and any authority that tries to say anything about drugs gets treated with suspicion.
In line with this, using fear of the worst possible outcome in order to scare people backfires heavily if it doesn't happen because then convincing them of anything related to that subject again is going to have to come from a completely different source and direction.
"My competitors are lying to you" is a variation of the "my competitors have a bad product" claim that I imagine many small businesses make to discredit the market leader.
Does it mean that the market leaders have a better product? Not necessarily, but I don't automatically trust a business to be honest about its competitors, especially if the business is new and gets market share by directly attacking its competitors.
All levels of aptitude/intelligence are equally likely to be conned because a con works by getting your emotions to turn your intelligence to the task of tricking you.
For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
But you might be better at that the more intelligent you are. E.g. I understand there's an established result that professional ethicists and ethics researchers act less ethically than the average person on average, because they find it easier to come up with excuses for how what they wanted to do was actually ethical.
So yes, a very intelligent person can come up with a sophisticated justification to trick themselves. A less intelligent person will come up with a less sophisticated narrative. Both people work on the con till it's enough to pass their bar, which is why I say it's a factor of desire rather than reason.
Taibbi is clearly a partisan hack that only attacks one side, ever. I don’t know the other one but his feed has a strong new right hack feel to it.
There are plenty of lefty hacks around too. It’s not a one sided phenomenon.
You should probably expand your reading to his articles in Rolling Stone, particularly those from 4-5 years ago. You would not say “ever” if you did that. But…for a writer that admittedly leans left in his politics, he is willing to call out that side when a story leads there.
He is much like Glenn Greenwald in that respect. Both he and Glenn get a lot of hate from folks on the left for daring to stray from the left messaging orthodoxy.
It’s ok to be on a “side” and still be critical of that side. No one would rightly accuse Bill Maher or Jimmy Dore of being conservatives, but they are damn sure critical of certain perspectives as of late of the American left.
I guess if your bubble is pulling it’s identity from the leftist dogma du jour anyone who departs from that orthodoxy would be dismissed as conservative.
Amazing that in 2023, Bernie Sanders and his supporters are now considered conservative.
That really is my point, the center political position is always arbitrary…in general and on any given single political opinion. So most normal people don’t break exactly along the dogmatic lines set by whatever is the governing authority of right and left.
My political opinion is driven above all else by pragmatism that does not break cleanly in right or left or by party. As such where i sit on the political spectrum is always relative to the person evaluating my opinion.
I used to identify as left, and would still do that, except that what passed for left-leaning news during COVID became nothing more than propaganda, and left-leaning journalist put their investigative and sceptical credentials to one side.
During COVID, and still perhaps even now, it turns out you can become a member of the far right, just by staying politically still.
There really seem to be some strange shifts recently in the US where the democrats have become quite a bit more hawkish and intolerant of alternative opinions than I have ever seen before in my lifetime.
Honestly, fuck outta here with "alternative opinions" noise.
Could be that. Well demonstrated!
> Their funding comes directly from readers rather than corporations or billionaire owned outlets
... is also problematic.
If I build a following of people with certain views, I'm aware that if I don't reach the conclusions they expect, they'll go away and take my funding with them.