Agents Of Chaos, Not Journalism
Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss were hand picked to promote the #TwitterFiles, not because they were good journalists, but because they were agents of chaos.
by Ben Cohen
Thankfully most sensible media outlets have given the #TwitterFiles story the space it deserves. As in not much space at all. However, there is an aspect of the story that has troubled me greatly over the past couple of weeks.
Elon Musk hand picked “independent” journalists to release the Twitter Files in order to project an image of transparency and neutrality. However, both the journalists Musk chose are far from neutral and added their own spin on the leak that radically affected the perception of the story.
Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files meant that the story behind the story became of equal importance. It highlighted how ideologically driven, unethical journalists can distort facts and use a story to manipulate opinion, and it helped bolster a new power center in media that has no accountability to anyone.
It is impossible to understand the Twitter Files story without this crucial context, and the reporters who leaked the files need to be held to account for helping damage an industry already plagued with bad actors.
Bari Weiss: a history of untruths
When Elon Musk contacted Bari Weiss to see whether she would be interested in taking a look at internal Twitter files, she quite literally ran at the opportunity. She wrote:
At dinner time on December 2 , I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of the Boring Company, founder of Neuralink, on most days the richest man in the world (possibly history), and, as of October, the owner of Twitter.
Was I interested in looking at Twitter’s archives, he asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ?
Two hours later, I was on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my wife, Free Press writer Nellie Bowles, and our three-month-old baby.
A discerning journalist might have paused and asked for outside counsel. They might have worried about Musk’s intentions and been wary of wrecking their reputation to service the whims of an egotistical billionaire. But not Weiss. She dropped everything and ran to the richest man on earth’s anti-woke HQ as soon as she was asked. Because as we shall see, Weiss regards ethical journalistic concerns a hindrance to her personal ambitions.
The former New York Times reporter made a name for herself when she quit the highly respected institution due to what she described as “woke” bullying. Weiss was fed up with the groupthink and wanted to be able to speak her mind about a number of issues. Weiss was a big supporter of Israel. She didn’t agree with much of the LGBTQ agenda, opposed Covid lockdowns, and felt liberals on Twitter were determining the paper’s editorial strategy. She wrote in her public resignation letter:
A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.
I happen to agree with Weiss on some issues. I am critical of identity politics extremists hijacking debates on race and gender, and do believe that the media has been complicit in much of this. I am particularly sympathetic to her concerns about rising anti-semitism and the left’s refusal to acknowledge Jews as a persecuted minority. My problem isn’t that Weiss is “anti-woke” though, it’s that she is “anti-woke” to the point of being dishonest.
Weiss leveled several serious accusations against New York Times staffers, both on Twitter before she resigned, and then in her public resignation letter. The problem is that her version of events have been vehemently denied by pretty much everyone around her.
Weiss once live-tweeted her take on the newsroom’s work dynamic, giving a radically different take on events to her colleagues who were not only in the same meeting room, but fact checking her in real time. The result was a very public humiliation that made Weiss look extremely dishonest. Here was the Times’s senior editor for Special Projects Dan Saltzstein’s take on the meeting:
And Diplomatic Correspondent Edward Wong’s:
These aren’t anonymous interns or corporate types, but seasoned, highly respected reporters. Weiss later claimed her colleagues called her “a Nazi and a racist,” and that her work and character were “openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels”.
If true, the Times has much to answer for. But no one corroborated her version of events, and senior executives and other journalists actively denied anything like that took place. Weiss, who has never been one to shy away from a fight, notably did not file a lawsuit.
Matt Taibbi’s terminal decline
I’ve covered the incredibly sad demise of Matt Taibbi as a credible journalist for several years now. It isn’t that Taibbi had an about turn politically, it’s that he seemed to forget every journalistic principle he once lived by to accommodate his ideological transformation.
There are few stories that highlighted Taibbi horrendous journalism more starkly than his fawning interview with Tucker Carlson. The once discerning reporter gave credence to Carlson’s bonkers conspiracy theory that the NSA was trying to get his show off the air and claimed that he was the victim of left wing smear attacks. ‘Spying and Smearing is "Un-American," not Tucker Carlson’, wrote Taibbi. He provided no evidence of anyone spying on Carlson, or of any “smearing”.
“Carlson is right. Fuck these people,” he said of Carlson’s critics. “They deserve whatever they get, including him.”
From tenacious journalist holding power to account, Taibbi had transformed into a submissive mouthpiece for Alt Right conspiracy theorists.
Taibbi also spectacularly flopped on Russiagate by denying mountains of evidence and instead claiming it was a liberal conspiracy theory designed to distract the public from their own failings. He also bizarrely proclaimed Russia definitely wouldn’t invade Ukraine despite publicly available satellite images of Putin’s troops on Ukraine’s border. The driving force behind this strange, fact free reporting was a mission to prove that America (and the liberals in the Deep State) was responsible for all evils in the world. He even wrote this in his apology for screwing up the Russian invasion story:
“My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism,” he wrote. “Being so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough.”
Taibbi, like Weiss, has carved an enormously lucrative niche for himself as a contrarian dedicated to countering “the mainstream consensus” (ie. attacking all things liberal). In doing so he has had to ignore evidence and facts he doesn’t like, while engaging in deliberately misleading “reporting” to further this new political ideology.
This makes Taibbi far from impartial, and Elon Musk picked him knowing full well he would help create the narrative he wanted to project.
Musk’s objective
Elon Musk has gone through a similar political transformation going from traditional liberal to Alt Right menace in a very short period of time. He has used Twitter as a personal tool to attack liberals, suppress speech he doesn’t like, and promote right wing conspiracies.
By handing over the Twitter Files to Weiss and Taibbi, Musk clearly knew they would provide the biased context that would fuel the right wing hysteria he has been busy capitalizing on.
If you study the language Weiss and Taibbi used when publishing the Twitter Files, it becomes immediately clear that they knew exactly what they were supposed to do. Both journalists were incredibly eager to insist there was something worth paying attention to, even though the files themselves didn’t reveal much at all. As The Banter’s Justin Rosario summarized:
#TwitterFiles 12/2 - The original dump. Former journalist Matt Taibbi went first with a much-hyped shocking inside look at how Twitter censored The Greatest Scandal Of The 21st Century™, i.e. Hunter Biden’s dick pics, errrrr… “laptop”. Hilariously, Taibbi stated unequivocally that no government coercion of any kind took place while still claiming the whole thing was an assault on the Fist Amendment….
#TwitterFiles2 12/8 - Dump Number 2 (redundant, I know). Never journalist Bari Weiss, who apparently does not know how to take a screenshot, took a shallow dive into how Twitter would limit the reach of accounts that repeatedly violated Twitter’s hate speech and disinformation policies. Again, to the great amusement/annoyance of normal people, Weiss went right ahead and proved the exact opposite point. While a lot of right-wing accounts were limited for egregious hate speech, great effort was taken to give a pass to some of the worst offenders to avoid the appearance of bias. Let’s be clear: Allowing one side to flagrantly violate the rules is, in and of itself, bias.
It should be noted that Weiss’s treatment of the files was markedly less biased than Taibbi’s, but still manipulative nonetheless. When railing against Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from the platform, Weiss did point out that they hadn’t banned a number of foreign leaders for violent/inflammatory rhetoric:
The problem with this comparison is twofold. Firstly, just because Twitter didn’t ban Ahmed and Modi doesn’t mean banning Trump was wrong. Secondly, Weiss doesn’t provide the crucial context within which Trump’s ban was decided.
Trump had spent almost a year pumping out insane conspiracy theories and deadly Covid misinformation on Twitter that likely led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Trump was such a danger that he almost killed himself and took out his entire White House by hosting a super spreader event at the peak of the pandemic. At the time of his banning, Trump had not only incited a violent coup, but was continuing to spread election fraud conspiracy theories almost exclusively on Twitter. The pressure to stop the insanity was reaching a boiling point, and Twitter didn’t really have much of a choice. That they failed to ban others inciting violence on the platform is not an argument to not ban Trump.
Twitter has always been inconsistent, but they absolutely did the right thing taking Trump off the platform. Weiss’s argument isn’t without merit, but like much of her work it ignores inconvenient context.
The new dump
As of writing this there has been yet another Twitter Files dump from Taibbi, who goes to even greater lengths to distort the story into something it isn’t. Take a look at Taibbi’s argument that the FBI was inappropriately interfering in Twitter’s moderation policies:
If you read the actual email, it becomes clear Taibbi’s take on it is breathtakingly manipulative. The "Master-canine" quality example is Fred from the FBI notifying Twitter that four accounts "may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy"
Taibbi conveniently leaves out the words "may potentially" "inaction" and "deemed appropriate" to make it seem like it was a directive coming from the FBI. It wasn't. They simply flagged a number of suspicious accounts and asked Twitter to take a look to see whether any “action or inaction” was “deemed appropriate within Twitter policy”.
In other words, the context Taibbi provided for the file was to deliberately strip all the actual context contained in the file. This is not what a journalist is supposed to do. In fact, it is an egregious violation of journalistic ethics to deliberately mischaracterize language in this way.
In response to Elon Musk turning around just days after the Twitter Files release and booting off journalists critical of him, Taibbi has said….nothing. Instead he is going after the “establishment” media:
Never mind the fact that these “corporate” journalists were complaining about Musk’s stunning hypocrisy and failure to adhere to Twitter’s own rules, not the censorship. Because why report on facts if you can create a convenient straw man?
“The alternative media complex”
I occasionally read Bari Weiss’s outlet The Free Press and find myself agreeing with some of the authors, at least in part. I do believe identity politics has become somewhat of a religion in left wing circles, and I agree with Weiss’s position that the more extreme it gets, the worse the reaction on the right will become. The Free Press (formerly Common Sense) has a number of thoughtful contributors who provide smart, well reasoned alternatives to mainstream liberalism. I don’t always agree, but I think it is part of healthy debate to listen to different perspectives. It is unfortunate that Weiss’s journalism is considerably worse than many of the writers she hires.
I subscribed to Matt Taibbi’s newsletter for some time and tried to make sense of the new ideological framework he had adopted. There were epic “investigative” reports proving Russiagate was a big hoax, sympathetic takes on MAGA extremism, and conversations with YouTube “intellectuals” like Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand. The articles became relentlessly uniform and predictable:
In essence, it was: Liberal media wrong, Matt Taibbi and other independent thinkers right.
Taibbi’s new journalism wasn’t just depressing though, it was terrible. So I unsubscribed and stopped taking him seriously. When Musk picked Taibbi to release the Twitter Files, my heart sank, mostly because I’d have to mine through his work again. Needless to say, it was a thankless task.
Musk’s decision will have serious ramifications for the industry for years to come. Taibbi and Weiss have now become folk heroes to millions of people who believe they represent an unbiased source of news in America. Both have gained hundreds of thousands of new followers on Twitter, and no doubt thousands more paid subscribers to their Substack newsletters making them incredibly wealthy. They also have a huge distribution network to publish shoddy journalism to without any oversight whatsoever. This is, as Axios journalist Sara Fischer writes, “The alternative-media industrial complex”.
It is incredibly dangerous that individual journalists with big Twitter audiences get this much power over public debate, particularly when they have ideological axes to grind. The media landscape is already deeply fractured, so the last thing we need is a new power center filled with rogue journalists claiming only they have the truth.
Just as Elon Musk is not going to save human civilization by purchasing a social media platform to troll liberals with, Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are not the saviors of journalism.
The new players in alternative-media industrial complex can more aptly be described as agents of chaos, upending norms not because they are wrong, but because they can be upended. This is not how journalism is supposed to work. And if we don’t push back against it we face a new era of disinformation far worse than anything we’ve seen before.
This article was funded by Banter Members and our Banter Patrons. If you are interested in helping us create more in depth reporting like this, please consider becoming a Banter Member or a Patron. You can get a Banter Membership for 50% off here. Membership gets you access to all premium content, our Members Only Podcast and more:
You can become a Patron and help at a deeper level here (with even more perks!):
“Needless to say, it was a thankless task.”
No. Thank you for another well-thought analysis.
I still have 4 of Taibbi's books on my shelf. what to do with them?