How To Gaslight Responsible Journalists

Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray provide a masterclass on bullshit.

NOTE: I published this piece earlier this month for Banter Members. It’s out for free today because I am becoming increasingly concerned about the onslaught of misinformation on social media, specifically conspiracies about the “mainstream media”. I have my issues with the corporate media system in America (I wrote about this yesterday), but the rapid rise of “Alt” media stars with huge Youtube/Twitter reach is a far, far more dangerous phenomenon.

Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray are sophisticated operators who have amassed serious power in the Alt media world. They are regular guests on the top Alt shows including The Joe Rogan Experience, Russell Brand’s podcast, Jordan Peterson’s podcast, etc etc. While skillful journalists and orators (Murray in particular), they trot out tired Alt conspiracies, most of which center around the “mainstream media” and the powerful liberals controlling it. I hope this piece helps lay bare some of the tactics they use to distort debate and gaslight flawed, but ultimately responsible journalists like Malcolm Gladwell, and Michelle Goldberg.

by Ben Cohen

I finally got around to watching the highly publicized Munk debate between Douglas Murray, Matt Taibbi, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michelle Goldberg that was filmed in November of last year.

The debate was an important one because it perfectly encapsulated the raging war between establishment media and the new, increasingly powerful coalition of independent “Alt” journalists. More than that though, it revealed the uphill battle responsible media outlets have combatting disinformation and rapidly declining public media literacy.

The premise

The Munk Debates feature discussions on major policy issues and are held semi-annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This particular event saw the four prominent media voices debating whether the “mainstream media” can continue to be trusted.

Murray and Taibbi took the position that the mainstream media has changed in recent years and follows a pre-ordained narrative it won’t deviate from. From the “freedom convoy” of truckers in Canada to Russiagate, Ivermectin and Hunter Biden’s laptop, Taibbi and Murray claimed the media failed to do its job and report certain facts because they were inconvenient to a “narrative” they wanted to sell. They argued that the mainstream media cannot be trusted because it fails to report on both sides of prominent stories and has drowned out conservative and dissenting voices.

Gladwell and Goldberg took the untrendy position that contrary to widespread belief, the mainstream media has in fact held up rather well during the major scandals and crises of the past few years.

“In terms of the big stories if you paid attention to the mainstream media you were likely to be much safer and much closer to the truth than…. if you followed the people who were saying ‘don't trust the mainstream media trust these alternative sources of information’” said Goldberg.

Citing rigorous journalistic process and fact checking, Goldberg and Gladwell took umbrage at their opponents’ characterization of the industry and argued that misinformation was predominantly coming from these alternative sources.

The debate on the debate

I found several things to be particularly interesting about the debate, and notably the reaction to the debate itself.

The resolution to be debated was: "Be it resolved, don't trust the mainstream media."

Before the debate, 48% voted in favor of the resolution, while 52% voted against it. After the debate concluded, 67% voted in favor of the resolution and 33% voted against it, meaning those watching concluded Taibbi and Murray were right. The reaction on Youtube was unanimous too — so much so that I couldn’t find a single viewer who agreed with Gladwell and Goldberg’s position.

Here’s a small selection of responses from the official Munk YouTube channel and another channel that had ripped the media from Munk’s website:

• “Malcolm gave the perfect talk to show exactly why nobody trusts his media.”

• “As an old fan of Malcolm Gladwell - I am SHOCKED how shallow, petty and illogical he is in real life. Won’t be buying any of his books anymore. Absolutely eye opening!”

• “This was one of the most intellectually lopsided debates I've ever seen. Douglas and Matt absolutely destroyed them. At least Michelle didn't almost cry this time. Malcolm looked like a foolish hack.”

• “Clearly Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi have a better grasp on the issues than do Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg. It was gratifying to see that the audience in attendance recognized this as well.”

• “The yawning gap between Douglas' intellectual alertness and outspokenness and his opponents intellectual void is just stunning. This sad performance of Goldberg and Gladwell is very indicative of the current state of mass media. Well done, Matt and Douglas.”

I actually read through the comments before watching the debate, so was primed to see these supposed intellectual giants ‘destroy’ the liberal hacks and present incontrovertible evidence proving their point.

Instead, I saw a deeply dishonest journalist and a preening intellectual roll out a series of straw man arguments, half truths, and conspiratorial generalizations that were almost impossible to counter given the time constraints.

A flawed premise

Gladwell and Goldberg did their best to deconstruct the onslaught of disinformation, but the format favored the provocateurs who have amassed a huge audiences on social media with their schtick.

The mainstream media advocates did make some noticeable mistakes during the debate. Goldberg’s responses were often disjointed and meandering making her arguments hard to follow. Gladwell correctly criticized Taibbi for harkening back to a bygone era of journalism, but then went too far and implied on several occasions that Taibbi was arguing only white men could be responsible journalists (he wasn’t). But overall, they did their best to point out the very obvious flaws in Taibbi and Murray’s arguments — and at least to my mind succeeded in doing so.

There were two interactions that perfectly illustrated Murray and Taibbi’s deeply manipulative and inherently flawed positions. The first was when Taibbi claimed the “mainstream media spent years following a fake story about Donald Trump being in league with Vladimir Putin to fix the 2016 election” and held this up as proof the media is irretrievably broken.

Goldberg tore this fallacy down definitively, pointing out the very obvious fact that the story wasn’t fake at all:

“This critique of the mainstream media [that it] is kind of ideologically blinkered is itself I think rooted in a very simplistic and distorted view of what's happening both in politics and in the relationship between the media and politics — I mean specifically the idea that there was nothing to the Trump Russia story,” said Goldberg.

“If we had at that moment known that…Donald Trump's campaign asked Russia for help in winning the election….if we had known that Donald Trump was seeking to do a huge business deal in Moscow and seeking Putin's assistance, if we had known at that moment that his campaign manager — who before then had managed the campaign of pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine — if we had known that his campaign manager was passing intelligence to somebody who was believed to be a KGB agent, and if we had known that Russia then did hack and hack and leak the emails of the democratic candidate for president — we would have thought, well, this is an astonishing Blockbuster. And so it's really much more complicated than that.”

Goldberg didn’t have time to properly refute Taibbi’s claim, but her outline of the evidence was entirely correct. There was a huge amount of evidence tying Trump’s campaign to the Kremlin, along with Trump’s business dealings with Russia over the years. Taibbi might have staked his entire journalistic reputation on disproving the Russia collusion story, but his peers have not and he is in a very small minority of serious reporters who think the story is “fake”.

The second example was Douglas Murray’s response to Malcom Gladwell’s eye rolling at the Hunter Biden laptop story.

“You don't want to hear it Malcolm of course you wouldn't because it goes against your ideological presumptions that story was a big story,” said a sneering Murray.

“The New York Post which I write for, the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper was silenced on Twitter, was silenced across media,” he went on. “You know the Washington Post has now picked it up it's saying that yeah the laptop's true but why didn't the media pick it up before? Why didn't they call up people? Why didn't they check whether the emails were accurate? Because they didn't want Biden to lose the election. He was their guy and they weren't going to screw that up.”

Goldberg quickly pointed out that the reason the mainstream media didn’t go anywhere near the Hunter Biden laptop story initially was because the New York Post itself believed the story was potentially fake.

“This is a revisionist history,” said Goldberg. “The person who wrote the New York Post story asked to have their name taken off of it because they thought the story was unreliable. The people who had the hard drive would not give it to the Washington Post in the New York Times before the election.”

Goldberg also pointed to The Washington Post’s extensive attempts to verify the files and argued that they behaved responsibly when they initially chose not to authenticate them.

Two sides? Not really

For the majority of reasonable people it is incredibly obvious that the mainstream media doesn’t treat stories from both sides of the political aisle equally because both sides are not equal.

Regardless of whether the Post’s Hunter Biden’s laptop story turned out to be true, the story still pales in comparison to, say, Trump’s murderous mishandling of the Covid pandemic, or his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.

The media is not obligated to follow every right wing conspiracy theory and grievance story in the name of objectivity. During Trump’s presidency and the 2020 election the mainstream media spent a huge amount of time and resources debunking the nonstop stream of lies and propaganda coming out of the White House. This wasn’t because of an agenda to destroy Trump’s presidency, it was because Trump was lying through his teeth about almost everything.

Taibbi and Murray have spent years claiming “both sides” are just the same, and now appear to believe that that the left is more dangerous than the right. This flies in the face of all available evidence, and it is hard to believe both men are arguing in good faith.

Sadly, much of the public appears to agree with Taibbi and Murray. In the debate, Taibbi cited a poll showing the collapse of trust in the mainstream media and heralded it as proof of his and Murray’s thesis. The reality though is that people like Taibbi and Murray are — at least partially — responsible for that collapse. This isn’t because they are brave truth tellers uncovering a great conspiracy theory, but because they are spreading the worst conspiracy theory of all: that liberals and conservatives in America are “just the same”.

They are not, and until the public understands this we will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes. If the 2016 election and the ensuing chaos wasn’t enough to convince Murray and Taibbi that “both sides” are not the same, their opinions are not only wrong, but actively dangerous.

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The Disintegration Of Discourse

Forces we don't understand are wrecking civil discourse and setting Americans on a path towards the abyss.

by Ben Cohen

I’ve been thinking recently about how our discourse has become so hostile, and have come to a slightly unnerving conclusion. In the past I would have meted out the responsibility for the current wreckage in the following order:

1. Republicans

I have long viewed the modern GOP as a neo-fascist insurgency movement responsible for the majority of America’s problems. Abetted by a powerful propaganda machine (Fox News), the Republican party has become the party of nihilism. It seeks only to acquire power and destroy. It is partly a product of the Gingrich revolution in the mid 90’s, but mostly a culmination of a decades long attempt to lock up the political power of an unfathomably rich, and very white minority.

2. The media

The corporate media system in America is a dysfunctional mess that has resulted in the splintering of American society into distinct echo chambers and entirely separate reality bubbles. The for profit model has meant big corporations figure out a demographic they want to target, then bombard them with content they want to see. Republicans get Sean Hannity, liberals get Rachel Maddow. Both sides aren’t the same of course, but NBCUniversal News Group and the Fox Corporation are in the game for money, not the public good… Continue reading here.