The Slow Death of Journalism, with Matt Taibbi

Summary

Breaking History – “The Slow Death of Journalism” with Matt Taibbi

Podcast: Breaking History by The Free Press
Host: Eli Lake
Guest: Matt Taibbi
Date: July 23, 2026
Episode Theme:
A candid conversation between veteran reporters Eli Lake and Matt Taibbi examining the rise of censorship, the changing relationship between Big Tech, government, and journalism, and the conundrum of truth, conspiracy, and public trust in the digital era.

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Overview of the Episode

This episode delves into the unraveling of traditional journalism amidst the challenges posed by digital censorship, government interventions, algorithmic amplification, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Eli Lake and Matt Taibbi reflect on their own experiences covering major stories, the mechanics and consequences of the “Twitter Files,” and discuss how media, both legacy and new, can mend trust and accuracy in an era dominated by suspicion and disinformation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Birth and Evolution of Digital Censorship (01:19–05:22)

• Matt Taibbi recounts his “Meet the Censored” journalism project:
  • Sparked by the 2018 digital purge, including Alex Jones and 600-800 other sites.
  • Describes the dynamic where platforms like Facebook acted on recommendations from groups like the Atlantic Council with little transparency.
  • Notably, Rolling Stone changed Taibbi's story headline to avoid seeming "anti-censorship."
• Quote:

  “There was a real problem with getting people in the media mainstream to pay attention to this issue. So I went out of my way to cover people on the political left who had, for whatever reason, been censored...” (03:41, Taibbi)

2. From Foreign Interference Panic to Policy Shift (05:22–10:45)

• Eli Lake and Taibbi agree that post-2016 election panic about "Russian interference" in platforms like Facebook and Twitter led to drastic policy changes.
• Social media CEOs, once adamant about not being “editors in chief of the universe,” switched to a posture of heavy moderation and compliance with government expectations.
• “Voluntary” agreements between tech companies and international security states set a precedent for new moderation norms, effectively outsourcing censorship to third-party NGOs.
• Quote:

  “The same basic structure of you’re not being directly censored, but the state is telling a private company that it has to exercise its speech rights in a certain way.” (09:14, Taibbi)

3. The Twitter Files: Peeling Back the Curtain (11:13–17:42)

• Taibbi details his experience with the Twitter Files:
  • Initial low expectations, then surprise at the level of formalized, government-influenced censorship.
  • Discovery of Slack messages (e.g., "flagged by FBI", "flagged by DHS", "flagged by FITF") showing direct governmental input on moderation.
  • The system involved numerous agencies and departments (FBI, DHS, State Department’s Global Engagement Center).
• Lake points out the narrative of press complicity: the Aspen Institute’s “war games” to pre-empt or suppress stories like the Hunter Biden laptop.
• Quote:

  “It’s like finding a secret city underneath the town you’ve been walking around for your whole life. So it was crazy.” (13:20, Taibbi)

  • On the Hunter Biden laptop:

    “The FBI was briefing the Senate and telling them that the laptop was not real after they had actually verified... Giving a false briefing to the U.S. Senate, I think, is a pretty major story.” (15:00, Taibbi)

4. Censorship’s Aftermath and Shifting Digital Norms (19:09–21:43)

• Formal bureaucracy-backed censorship (Global Engagement Center, FITF, etc.) has largely been dismantled post-2024, but platforms retain the ability to amplify or deamplify at will.
• Barry Weiss contributed to uncovering shadow-banning and deamplification mechanisms.
• The risk persists: privately controlled, opaque moderation and unequal amplification.
• Quote:

  “If you're going to have a bad system, I'd rather have two of them than one, because… you have some hope of getting some kind of leverage…” (21:14, Taibbi)

5. The Rise of Slop, Nonsense, and Conspiracism Online (22:16–25:31)

• Lake raises the challenge of how social media’s algorithms reward extremity and slop, using the example of the Vice President discussing Epstein conspiracy theories on Joe Rogan.
• Taibbi laments the loss of professional standards and career consequences for publishing falsehoods in legacy media, replaced by the algorithmic reward for insanity:
• Quote:

  “The algorithm... wants to feed something that's right in the middle of your most extreme views. And so you get this progression of sort of escalating insanity on the Internet...” (24:23, Taibbi)

6. Institutional Failures and “Information Nihilism” (27:47–36:50)

• Lake argues that official errors—Russiagate, COVID origins suppression, etc.—eroded public trust and fuel “informational despair” and nihilism.
• Taibbi places the ultimate blame on the institutional press for not holding itself to higher standards, allowing official and private disinformation to proliferate.
• Both cite examples:
  • Collusion hoaxes
  • COVID-19 misinformation from authorities and suppression of uncomfortable truths about vaccines or origins.
• Quote:

  “For my part, I… really very much blame the traditional press for this because they had an opportunity to hold themselves out as, you know, the ultimate arbiters of what is true and what is not by holding themselves to high standards. But… they keep promoting openly wrong stories...” (31:25, Taibbi)

• On the dynamic of “blanket authority” suppressing disagreement:

  “That is the worst of all possible worlds… when you have one big blanket sort of authority and they're telling you something that's not true. And you can't see the alternative views.” (33:14, Taibbi)

7. How Can Journalism Regain Trust? (42:24–51:19)

• Taibbi suggests that journalism is fundamentally a trust business. Restoring trust will come only from consistency, transparency, repeated honesty, and self-correction—even if financially unrewarded in the short term.
• A lament for the demise of professional camaraderie and the loss of competition for real stories; instead, incentivization now favors sensationalist manias and viral rage.
• Outdated objectivity may, in retrospect, have been a worthwhile aspiration.
• Quote:

  “The only way you can gain trust with people is to show them over and over and over again that you care about what's correct…” (42:28, Taibbi)

• Journalists and politicians alike are no longer punished for blatant untruths—creating a dangerous climate where entertainment and fury trump truth.

8. Final Reflections & The Way Forward

• Both share skepticism about quick fixes; hope may lie in new leaders, smaller outlets, and public exhaustion with outrage cycles.
• A call to revive careful, fact-based, and competitive reporting, and to reject the farce of “independent fact checkers” as a replacement for real journalism.
• Closing quote:

  “When I worked overseas… all the correspondents knew one another… Even if we kind of went after each other publicly… the idea of moving stories forward was a good one… Now… it's only interpersonal warfare… [and] what's factually right… feels like maybe a third or fourth level consideration for most.” (49:08, Taibbi)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I don't know any journalist who wouldn't be, you know, to excuse the term, like, very horny to look at this material. Right. Like, it does not happen that the CEO of a major company says, come rummage around in our files unsupervised.”
  — Matt Taibbi, (11:36)
• “You can say basically anything you want to, and there's no expectation that anything will happen to you.” — Matt Taibbi, (23:21)
• “Usually there aren't conspiracies. Usually you can explain things because human beings are flawed and they make errors... and occasionally there really is a conspiracy.” — Eli Lake, (36:50)
• “But now everybody wants you to sign on to some big, almost monotheistic theory about things, and those are almost never true.” — Matt Taibbi, (36:50)
• “I was very critical of the old objectivity system when I was coming up… But as an aspiration… now that I'm getting older… it wasn't the worst idea in the world.” — Matt Taibbi, (47:05)
• “I call independent journalists? Journalism.”
  — Eli Lake, joking about the absurdity of "independent fact checkers," (50:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:19 — Origins of “Meet the Censored”
• 03:59 — Broadening beyond ideology in censorship coverage
• 06:05 — 2016 election’s impact on Big Tech and government relations
• 11:13 — Beginning of Twitter Files investigation
• 13:20 — Discovery of government input in moderation
• 15:00 — FBI false briefing on Hunter Biden laptop
• 19:09 — Has censorship really faded post-2024?
• 21:43 — Persistent amplification/deamplification issues
• 24:23 — How algorithms amplify extremes
• 27:47 — Institutional disinformation and public nihilism
• 36:50 — Reality: conspiracies or human error?
• 42:24 — Journalism’s trust problem and solutions
• 47:05 — Reflecting on objectivity and media competition
• 50:10 — Fact-checking as a stand-in for real reporting

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Episode Tone

• Frank, critical, self-aware, occasionally nostalgic, often admonishing. Both Taibbi and Lake mix dry humor and pointed analogies with substantial, unsparing analysis.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a thorough, sometimes sobering tour through the landscape of modern journalism—its betrayals, bureaucracies, and hope of redemption. By rooting the crisis in both historical perspective and recent scandal, Taibbi and Lake provide a roadmap for anyone wishing to understand today’s information morass—and perhaps glimpse a path out.

Transcript

[Unknown Introductory Speaker]

The 5Q that is next year's model. Lee Harvey Odds. Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again.

[Eli Lake]

Welcome back. Breaking History, listeners. This is a real treat. This is Mataibi. In my view, there are a lot of people who kind of needlessly throw around the idea of intellectually courageous and so forth. But Matt really does put his money where his mouth is and manages to, I think, infuriate all sides in a good way and write what he believes and has paid the consequences. Whether it's kind of spurning a friendship with Elon Musk, certainly angering people in the center right. Like myself. And now, I think recently refusing to. To toe the line on the left. I have to say I really, you're one of the writers I really admire. And to somebody who was friends with the late Christopher Hitchens, I've always thought that really are in his footsteps. So thank you so much, Matt, for coming on.

[Matt Taibbi]

That is a very generous introduction. Eli, thank you so much. And you've been great. And I've been increasingly reading you a lot lately, so feel like there's a

[Eli Lake]

time, I think, when Matt and I were like, secretly, like, we despised each other.

[Unknown Introductory Speaker]

Exactly.

[Matt Taibbi]

But anyway, no, that was my fault. But go ahead.

[Eli Lake]

My fault, too. I want to, I want to just kind of ask you because you started something, I guess it was in the Biden era on Racket, which I loved. It was a feature called Meet the Censored. Tell me about how you started that and who was on that list. And like, how, how. What are we talking about and what was the problem like when you started it? And then we'll talk about how things are now.

[Matt Taibbi]

So the genesis of this was in the summer of, I believe it was 2018, when Alex Jones was removed from the Internet. And I read a couple of stories about how Facebook and some other Internet platforms had received recommendations from the Atlantic Council about which sites to remove. And then there was a kind of a small, lightly covered story about what's. What was later called the Purge, where there were about 600 or 800 sites that were just wiped out for no apparent reason. They called it coordinated inauthentic activity. And I thought, well, that's kind of a crazy story. So I pitched my editors at Rolling Stone a story about what was happening with all these small, independent kind of mom and pop media organizations that in some cases had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in boosting their audience with the site, only to wake up and have it all be gone. And in the course of doing that story, I found out you Know, this was finding out how bad the digital censorship and how elaborate it was already, I think, I think it had gone farther down the road than most people had any sense of. And I did a story in Rolling Stone. They were so.

[Eli Lake]

What year was this?

[Matt Taibbi]

This was 18. It's still 18.

[Eli Lake]

20. 18.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. And they were so. They were even Rolling Stone was so worried about being seen as anti censorship that they changed the headline in the story. It's. It now reads who will fix Facebook? Because they wanted to appear to be on the side of getting rid of hate speech and that sort of stuff on the site. Anyway, long story short, I realized that there was a real problem with getting people in the media mainstream to pay attention to this issue. So I went out of my way to cover people on the political left who had had, for whatever reason, had been censored, suppressed, shadow banned, whatever it was. And I did that for years and of course got very little traction except on sort of the very, you know, left end sites, basically.

[Eli Lake]

So it starts on the left, but you, you're. You, you brought in. I mean, I remember reading one about Sherry Deville, the porn star. I mean, you did, you covered the whole range. It was not a question of my ideological comrades are being censored. And so I'm going to come to their. I'm going to be the white knight. It was, I don't like censorship, period. And let's talk about what, you know, these individuals who've had their sites deplatformed.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. And I wasn't really thinking about the ideology of it or who was getting it worse or any of those things. I was really very interested in the mechanics of it. Because the real question is, what do these platforms have in their toolboxes to use against their customers? And are they getting direction from somewhere? What's triggering, you know, somebody being taken offline? Even in the Alex Jones case, there was a very, I thought, serious unanswered question about whether that had been coordinated between different companies. Was that anti competitive behavior? Like what. What went on there? And we still don't really know the answer to that. So that's what I was focusing on is what, what triggers this. Well, what, what causes a porn star to lose her sight? Like, what causes. What causes, you know, a medical professional to be, you know, forced to use different terminology? That. That's what I was doing.

[Eli Lake]

Now, before we get to the kind of. What I thought was, was brilliant reporting, Barry Weiss was involved too, but was the Twitter files. But I want to kind of get to the roots of it. I think you and I might. I think we agree that this starts because of the freakout after the 2016 election. And there was this view that Facebook was in its news feed kind of. It was being manipulated by foreign actors, and people were getting disinformation about the election. And this became an obsession as part of the Russiagate stuff that we both covered. And that led to real policy changes in the companies themselves and the relationship to the government. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Matt Taibbi]

Sure. And I found out the bulk of the answer to this question while doing the Twitter files. But yet, to answer your question, even looking from the outset side, you could see that after 2016, suddenly this. The Senate was furious about foreign interference, and they were dragging the heads of these companies. Remember, they were. There was sort of weird, like, show trial appearances by executives from Twitter, Facebook and Google. And they would be hauled into these hearings and, you know, there would be a demand, what are you going to do to stop the sewing of discord on your. On your platforms? And these. These executives would give these answers as if they were terrified of not sounding compliant, like, and these are the same people who had previously said things like, we're not. I don't want to be the editor in chief of the universe. It's not our job. I mean, I. I knew some of the people in the business pretty well, and they very much did not want to be in the business of picking and choosing content. But after 2016, 2017, there was a radical change within the tech business, and they all started to adopt a new posture toward content.

[Eli Lake]

Okay, So I always found this to be one of the classic examples of, like, if you care about free speech, be wary. Because it starts with a fairly reasonable point. We don't think that foreign bots and foreign influencers should be able to disguise themselves as Americans. All right, that makes sense if you want to say. If you want to put a little thing saying this is somebody this account is based in, wherever that seems reasonable. But then pretty soon, it went to include all kinds of things that we did not anticipate with the original rationale. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it included both hate speech, but then election denial, and then later under Covid medical misinformation. And by the end of Trump's first presidency, it was like we really were living in a censorship digital regime.

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

I mean, that's the thing, is that it starts with this kind of, oh, right, everybody can agree maybe the Russians did something here. And then it ends in four. In four Years. It's like off to the races, right?

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. So what's interesting about this is that if you go back and look, if you remember the big terrorist attacks in Europe, you know, the ones in. I believe it was Brussels and in France, that led to a series of demands by the EU that all the major Internet platforms sign these voluntary codicils on changing their approach to what they call terrorist speech. Uh, but the essence of it was that it. It created a new relationship between the platforms and the security state where they were responsible. You know, again, what's so interesting about this is that the format kind of replicated itself endlessly. The same basic structure of you're not being directly censored, but the state is. Is telling a private company that it has to exercise its speech rights in a certain way. And so all the companies sign these sort of quote unquote, voluntary agreements under very heavy pressure with Europe in 2016. And then the same thing happened after Trump and Brexit here in the United States. Again, the same process I just described to you, where they were dragged to the Hill. And there was a sort of unspoken threat that, that if you don't play ball, we're going to regulate you much more severely, there's going to be higher taxes, et cetera, et cetera. And so they started to institute essentially the same system that. That Europe was formerly moving toward, which was you have to abide by the recommendations of, you know, these sort of impartial NGOs that. That will flag things for you, and then you then take them down. That's. That's when I mentioned before, at the very beginning, the. The sites that were taken down at the behest of, you know, after recommendations from the Atlantic Council. That's essentially the format that Europe had already adopted, where, you know, some NGO tells you this is bad content, and the company, in most cases just takes down the content or de. Amplifies it. So, yeah, that's exactly what happened. It starts off with a premise that sounds reasonable. We don't want Russian bots giving us the news. But it very quickly expanded into other universes, which we found out at the Twitter files.

[Eli Lake]

So let's, let's go through. Because I feel like the Twitter files, in a weird way, that story hit kind of, you know, before we found out how decrepit Biden was. And there was a kind of. So it hit at a moment when there was a lot of pushback because people hated Elon Musk. And they, they. They almost. I mean, I remember being extremely jealous of like, hey, I wish I was called to look at this. I'm just like, story of the century kind of thing.

[Matt Taibbi]

Oh, I know. Yeah, I was jealous of myself. But, yeah, go ahead.

[Eli Lake]

And you had a lot of journalists at the time who were saying. Saying that you had sold out because you were, you know, looking at these raw files and finally kind of getting at the bottom of the story, which itself was strange. But just go into, like, what do we. How bad was it, in your view? How would you describe what we learned in Twitter files? Was actually the. This was what was going on.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. First of all, about the criticism about selling out and everything. I don't know any journalist who wouldn't be, you know, to excuse the term, like, very horny to look at this material. Right. Like, it does not happen that the CEO of a major company says, come rummage around in our files unsupervised.

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

Just doesn't happen. So when that opportunity presented itself, I had. I had actually very low expectations of what we were going to find. You know, the available evidence superficially was really pretty limited to Mark Zuckerberg talking about maybe being pressured on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which, you know, that. That would be a big deal in itself if it were true. But we didn't know anything about any kind of other bureaucracy or anything going on underneath that. And what's interesting is the first stuff that we saw didn't even really point us in that direction. It wasn't until about a week after we started getting access to things that suddenly we started seeing all these little notes in Slack chats that would say, flagged by FBI. Flagged by dhs, flagged by fitf, which was. Is the Foreign Influence Task Force of the FBI. And we started to learn about all these acronyms that we didn't even know about. Flagged by geck, which is the Global Engagement center of the State Department. And I'm thinking, why is the state of the United States sending recommendations about domestic content to a company like Twitter? It made no sense at all. And it took a lot of digging and kind of jigsaw puzzle work to figure it out. But eventually we learned that there was a very formal structure that probably about 20 different companies were involved with, but where complaints or recommendations for center censorship that came from the federal government would go through the FBI, and the ones that came from the states would go through the dhs and they would be processed. You know, they would all get a look by the sort of trust and safety departments of these companies, which I thought was horrifying. Like, you know, it's, it's like finding a secret city underneath, you know, the, the town you've been walking around for, for your whole life. So it was crazy.

[Eli Lake]

Okay, now I just want to get to the Hunter Biden laptop because just to refresh, the New York Post had gotten the contents of the laptop. They published a story and, and the, the story was deemed to be Russian disinformation and you weren't even allowed to share it. And then they had to delete a post in order to kind of get back. And this is a month before the election, the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper. And there was, of course, the 51 former intelligence officers who signed a letter saying it has all the hallmarks, but without exactly saying it was Russian disinformation. What was kind of a red pill, many of many red pill moments for me was when we learned later that the FBI itself had authenticated the laptop.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

It was part of an investigation and yet another arm of the FBI, what happened there was, was saying, don't put it out there. I mean, well, there were a lot,

[Matt Taibbi]

there were, okay, many different things were going on there. One which I think was incredibly serious and, and still it's gotten almost no press. No follow up was that the FBI was briefing the Senate and telling them that the laptop was not real after they had actually verified the fact that it, you know, this, this was genuine. So, you know, the FBI giving a false briefing to the U.S. senate, I think is a pretty major story in the, especially in the middle of a presidential election. You know, and again, I wasn't a Trump supporter, right? So I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, wow, that's, that's really bad. That was happening. The FBI was communicating with all the major Internet platforms and we didn't find harder evidence about this until later, but they essentially, they were recommending that they avoid what they called hack and leak stories. And the companies adopted new policies. Now, to be clear, like, a hack and leak is a legitimate form of journalism. Like, there's even a Supreme Court case about this that says that you can publish stolen material. It's as long as it's real, there's no real reason to have a prohibition against it. But Twitter was told, or it assumed that this material had been stolen and given and dumped by the Russians. And so they banned it on that basis. And as you said, they even prevented people from, they use the very highest form of censorship that they have that is used for, like, child porn. Like, you can't even share it in dms, that kind of thing. And then they lock the account of the New York Post. And then subsequently we found out that a lot of these, the major reporters have been briefed about the possibility of this story's existence at an Aspen Institute meeting like two months before the story broke and had war gamed how to not cover it, which was another thing we found. But that's extraordinary.

[Eli Lake]

That's unbelievably extraordinary. I mean, I just want to underline this. One of the things about our free press in America is that we're supposed to all be competing with each other. Exactly. So when you have a group of other, of journalists from all these other things, and I've been to these Aspen Security forums, I mean, not that one, but I've been to them, there is an element where, no, we're no longer competing, we're all collaborating. And that right there is, you know, it's not the same as Pravda and the state run media in this former Soviet Union, but it's kind of, you're getting, you're on the road there. So that's funny.

[Matt Taibbi]

I was actually a member of the Union of Journalists, the old, the old right in Russia. But, but yes, and, and giving each other off the record privileges too. Right? That's a big deal. Like you're sitting around getting briefed on something and then it turns out to be a story later and you're, you're kind of bound not to say anything. Seems kind of crazy to me. But yeah, you're absolutely right.

[Eli Lake]

No, I, I agree. I mean, and I have to say I haven't been to the Aspen Security Forum in some years, but I know exactly what that environment is like and it is a problem, especially when it gets to that point of like, oh, where there's a big story that might be coming out. Oh, really? What does it say? And so now just, I mean, we're, we're, we're going pretty fast. Eventually, I think this all breaks in part because there are some important legal challenges which I think does start to name names and put the pressure on these companies. And then Trump's elected in 24. And it's a little strange because Mark Zuckerberg was very enthusiastic about these kinds of initiatives at one point, then sort of turns on a dime and he becomes the brologarch. He becomes the guy who, you know. Yeah, I'm tired of wokeness. And it seems like the vibe really did shift. Elon basically kind of does an amnesty for a lot of the band accounts on Twitter and all of it seems to kind of fade away. Has it?

[Matt Taibbi]

No.

[Eli Lake]

Where are we right now?

[Matt Taibbi]

Well, so, so on the plus side, yeah, as far as I can tell, the, the formal bureaucracies that had been established pre Trump have actually been dismantled. So the Global Engagement center at the, at the State Department, which was a pretty significant organization, you know, what was actually broken up, they physically scattered the, the people in the department to different places. The FITF and the FBI, as far as I understand, has also been taken down. We don't know a whole lot about what's going on at the Pentagon, and we, we only got to see a little bit of what their operations look like. So I'm not 100 confident that, that those operations have been stopped. But, but, so that's the, that's the good part. Right. Like, the United States was trending toward being folded into this system that they have in Europe now, which is, this is a horrific, draconian, sweeping law called the Digital Services act, which is essentially a gigantic Orwellian kind of oversight law. We're not doing that. But the individual platforms are still, you know, weighting things as they see fit and de amplifying some accounts to an extreme degree, and other accounts are being amplified to an extraordinary degree on X. I think it's pretty obvious that some accounts are getting a lot more air time and others are not. Right. And so the problem still exists. You know, anytime you're going to have private owners, these companies are going to have, you know, some kind of viewpoint about what they're about, what to amplify and what not to do. And by the way, this, this was, this was Barry's big, you know, contribution to the Twitter files was discovering how, you know, the de amplification and shadow banning works.

[Eli Lake]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

But they all do it. I don't think it's a whole lot better than it was before. But the one thing that's a plus in my view, is that it's two different things as opposed to one. Right. Like, if you're going to have a bad system, I'd rather have two of them than one, because at least in that, you know, arena, you have some hope of getting some kind of leverage, you know, to, to reduce the amount of censorship.

[Eli Lake]

So now I'm going to come at it in a different way, which is to say I, I don't think there's Ebony. I'm not making it a. Defensive of the censorship, particularly of the late teens and early 2000s. It was too much. And these kind of corporate bureaucrats and federal bureaucrats had way too much power and it was ridiculous. And true stories were censored, as we know with 100 laptop. But the prevalence and popularity of just slop and conspiracy theories and nonsense

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

is

[Eli Lake]

really a feature of social media today, it seems. And just as an example of that, I kind of want to get your thoughts on this is that we saw. I have no, I'm not a hater of Joe Rogan. I occasionally watch the clips. But the Vice President of the United States went on Joe Rogan. He was asked about the Epstein files and his response was, in my view, I'm still gobsmacked. He basically said that he looked through it, he couldn't find, but he was probably linked to Mossad, probably linked to the US Intelligence community, but we'll never know because they probably destroyed those. And that is like puring gasoline because of who he is, the Vice President on a wild conspiracy. We're never going to be rid of this. And so are we living in some ways in the worst of both worlds where there's still some censorship, but we don't have at least the function of keeping, you know, nonsense, you know, doesn't get a megaphone where it seems to right now.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And you know, you and I both came up in journalism during a time one, it was relatively rare for something that was factually, completely wrong to appear in the news. There were pretty good mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening. People could be wrong in a general sense, sort of politically, or they, they could make an assertion that was outlandish, but you couldn't say something that was just untrue about an individual, for instance, and expect to get away with was it was career ending in many cases. If you did that, that is no longer the case. Now you can say basically anything you want to, and there's no expectation that anything will happen to you. People have figured out that the algorithms on these sites reward the most outlandish kinds of behavior. I mean, the analogy I like to use is that if the. When the algorithm determines that your circle of this, these are your interests, it looks for something that's right in the middle. Right. It doesn't want to. It doesn't want to feed you anything that's outside your zone of thought. It wants to feed something that's right in the middle of your most extreme views. And so you get this progression of sort of escalating insanity on the Internet and especially if your livelihood depends on traffic people, in some cases, they don't even want to. But they, they, they drift in that direction. And that's very, very unhealthy. But I don't know what the answer to that is. Right. Like there is no corresponding mechanism to, for instance, the New York Times v. Sullivan universe that we lived in the 80s and 90s where people were afraid before they published something of getting things wrong. Look at some of the most popular podcasters out there today and, and the stuff they say, they're clearly not worried about that. And you're absolutely right. That's, that's very dangerous.

[Eli Lake]

This episode is presented by JPMorgan Chase.

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

For over 225 years, JPMorgan Chase has

[Eli Lake]

believed one of the greatest investments they've ever made is in America because this

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

country's value lies in its people progress and potential.

[Eli Lake]

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[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

By supporting these critical industries, JPMorgan Chase

[Eli Lake]

is helping to secure the future and future fuel intervention across the country. Because when companies like JPMorgan Chase invest in America, they know the returns are limitless. Learn more about their [e-mail] America going

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

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[Eli Lake]

Like, why is this? I mean, I think the algorithms is part of it. I would add that when you had the people kind of at the commanding heights of the culture and media telling you that the President very well may be a Russian asset, and that turned out to be literally disinformation from a political campaign, and then there was no accountability for it. So you still see the same people who told you that, and they just act as if it never happened. That that might lead someone to say, well, maybe nothing that I thought I knew is true. And that can lead to what is almost a kind of informational despair where you just are, you know, you'll believe anything.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah, like nihilism almost, right?

[Eli Lake]

Yeah, yeah, like a, kind of a nihilism. But it's a nihilism that's born from a. I'm not going to be fooled again. So it's not like. And some of it might be that you have charismatic political and media leaders from Tucker Carlson apparently now to JD Vance. Although I don't, I don't know If I think J.D. vance believes, you know, he, Susie Wiles in the famous profile said he is a conspiracy theorist. I don't know if he is or if he's playing a conspiracy theorist because he's trying to get the votes of conspiracy theorists. But whatever it is we now have, it's now, you know, Anna Paulina Luna, I think you're a representative in Congress who has called. I mean, I'm all for declassifying government documents. I did a whole thing on the Kennedy assassination where I said I'm not a. I don't believe that it was a conspiracy and I think Oswald was single government. But I understand why many people do think it was because the government lied to us about many other things in that moment, including the Kennedy assassination. So I get it. But it's. Why, why are we, I mean, how do. I mean, we are. Seem to be in a kind of doom loop at least, and particularly on the political right where people believe crazy theories of the. About how the world works that ultimately is disempowers themselves. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like ultimately we can't do anything about it because there's a they and usually the they are the Jews. But that's a separate question. But, you know.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's difficult if you, if you release a gazillion files like they did in the case of the Epstein situation, like, you know, and the Trump administration only has itself to blame for this gigantic mess that they got themselves into with Epstein because the, so many of the people who ended up joining the administration were pounding the table about how the proof is going to be in these files, and we're gonna, we're gonna let them out. So that creates this groundswell of expectation about the importance of the story and what the story means. And so when you release all this stuff into the public, there is a tendency for people to, you know, misinterpret what they're looking at. They don't realize sometimes that when, you know, people send all kinds of complaints and to the FBI, and that doesn't mean that they're true or that they have any, you know, basis in reality, but people will chase them as if they're real stories, though. There's a guild by association thing that happens. That's, that's another unfortunate leftover from this, you know, kind of cancel culture era that we're in. But yeah, absolutely, like the, the, there is a conspiracism that's been sort of wrapped into how people consume news now that is really unfortunate. And for my part, I, like, I, I, I really very much blame the traditional press for this because they had an opportunity to hold themselves out as, you know, the ultimate arbiters of what is true and what is not by holding themselves to high standards. But as you say, when they keep falling, not even falling for when they, when they keep promoting openly wrong stories like WMDs or, you know, the Russia gate thing. Another bad example was, you know, the COVID story when, you know, we looked in the Twitter files and there, there's a very important concept in there that, that I, I don't think people have wrapped their heads around. Like, during the pandemic there, there was, there was a lot of discussion about people from among people in these companies about how, you know, this is an emergency. We really need to prevent deaths. So we have to get ahead of the curve in terms of stopping bad information. And so let's not, let's not focus on individual things. Let's look at narratives. So the, the standard becomes anything that, that promotes hesitancy is a kind of disinformation. But, but very often this was true information. Like, right, somebody goes to the, to get the vaccine, they, they get myocarditis and die. Now, that might be rare, but it happened. It's not disinformation, but the, the companies were suppressing this and then they were, they were suppressing stuff that they were wrong about. Right. Like, for instance, they breakthrough infections they thought. They thought were an exceedingly rare thing. And so the CDC was telling all these companies, you know, to shut that down, but they were wrong about that. And so that's like an official conspiracy theory. Which is the worst. To me, that is the worst of all possible worlds. When you have one big blanket sort of authority and they're telling you something that's not true. And you can't see the alternative views

[Eli Lake]

or the origins of COVID which were suppressed. And then our role in funding, you know, some of the research, gain of function research was also suppressed. And. And that, to me is unforgivable. Which is another part of all this.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah, exactly. Like if. And they were also, at the same time that they were suppressing that, they were also the organized campaigns against doing your own research. Right, right. You know, you would see all. All this stuff on both. Both in the messaging of medical officials, but also in kind of pop culture picking on people who did that. But yeah, if you're. You don't have access to the basic materials and you're being told something that isn't true, it creates a very unhealthy situation.

[Eli Lake]

Now, the, the problem, I think, was that there was this kind of, you know, shift, and there was a sense of. There was like, oh, well, it's a medical emergency. We have to get a lot of people to take this. We can't have. But then there is an overcorrection, which is that just because there were lies told by medical, by the pharmaceutical companies and the CDC about the COVID vaccine does not mean that vaccines themselves are a fraud. But we have lots of people who now think that, including some of them. Secretary of the Health and Human Services, which is problem we're kind of living in right now. So it's like we've sort of overcorrected in a sense because of the. Because the institutions themselves were kind of exposed as well. Is that what you're basically saying? Yeah.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. So, I mean, to me, it's all downstream from the same initial problem.

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

If you. If you don't tell the truth to people about a vaccine, then they're going to. Their thoughts are going to wander towards, well, what happened with other vaccines? Why should we trust this? And, you know, there are a few things. It's a mixed bag. Like, people did accept some disinformation about vaccines back in the day, but you can absolutely go too far and do essentially the same thing. Like if, if you're. If pre. If the CDC is telling you that they want you to block out a whole narrative about anything that promotes hesitancy. Well, you can go in the other direction and say, well, anything about vaccines is bad. And we don't. We don't want to promote that. And so you get these sort of competing wrong visions of how to do media when. When again, the. The reality of most stories is that everything is idiosyncratic. There's a mix of true and false in almost every story. And this is what bothers me. I'm sure it's probably true with you, too. When we used to do reporting, like, it was kind of understood that there were going to be some things that were true, some things that were not. Like, we have to hash out what the little details are. But now everybody wants you to sign on to some big sort of almost like a monotheistic theory about things, and those are almost never true. And people. Yeah, very simple.

[Eli Lake]

Almost never true at all. Right, Right, right. Usually the world's pretty messy. Usually there aren't conspiracies. Usually you can explain things because human beings are flawed and they make errors, and people get into groupthink. I mean, there's all kinds of things, usually of how it works, and occasionally there really is a conspiracy. Dr. Fauci really did tell people to, you know, not mention the fact that we paid for the gain of fun. Like, that's true.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

And that's. And like, you can point to that, and you can point to the fact that, you know, the FBI had ample evidence, you know, by, I would say, February or March of 2017, that the entire Russiagate story was wrong, and they flamed it, and they acted as if it was an ongoing investigation. So that was pretty terrible. And there are all kind. There are examples of that occasionally that you kind of get like, oh, my God, this is sinister. But usually it's just incompetent.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right, right. Usually. And. But I mean, even sometimes, I covered both of those stories. Right. Like, I was. I was kind of maybe a little bit too obsessed with the Russiagate story. I was one of the first people who. To say, I. I don't know. This doesn't feel right to me.

[Eli Lake]

I was there with you. Let's just be real. I could not. When we finally learned who the. Who Christopher Steele's sources in Russia were and how that information, I. My. That was it for me. I was like, oh, my God.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right?

[Eli Lake]

That's the source. Because I was assuming that they had some Kremlin insider or something. I just. I mean, I was like, there's no way the FBI and the. I mean, how could our US Intelligence community, which I've covered for years, have been basically. I mean, it's like a researcher who, by the way, was investigated for maybe being a Russian agent.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

It was hired by a private contractor who had drinks with, like, people he knew. What. The whole thing was kind of like, pathetic, you know, I mean, it was like.

[Matt Taibbi]

It was incredible. I remember talking to a friend of mine and like a. Who was still in journalism at the time, who. This was at the end of 2016, who was saying, this is either the biggest intelligence story in history, right, that the Russians have gotten the Manchurian Candidate in the White House, or it's the biggest hoax and there's. There's no other middle ground. Like, we're either lied to on an unprecedented scale or. Or the Russians have pulled off something amazing. And that dichotomy was really hard to. To navigate for a long time. You know, it was very hard to wrap one's head around the idea that either thing could be true, so.

[Eli Lake]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. I don't know. I'm sure you went through the, you know, day. Days where you thought I went through days of thinking I must be seeing this wrong somehow, like I must be missing something. And, you know, it turned. It turned out to be.

[Eli Lake]

Turned out to be crazy in some ways worse than I thought. Again, because I assumed that a former senior MI6 guy would have had Russian sources. That's the part of it that I should have realized that actually, no, they're all incompetent grifters. He was in a business to make other people think he had hot information, as was global GPS or whatever. All of these people were in this business of making it appear that they had something they didn't.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. And then you find out as you're looking at this, that there are other things that you imagine couldn't possibly be true that are true. Like that, you know, a high ranking, you know, maybe not a station chief, but. But something on that order in MI6, who is living in Moscow, doesn't speak Russian. Like, how is that possible?

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

How is that. That's a great one.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right?

[Eli Lake]

Amazing, right?

[Matt Taibbi]

It's one of those things where it's like that scene in all the President's Men where they got the big story wrong because they assumed that certain questions must have been asked in the grand jury and they weren't like. Like we assume that the. That the MI6 spy in charge of the Russia desk knows some Russians.

[Unknown Introductory Speaker]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

And it turns out not to be the case.

[Eli Lake]

So it's incredible. And there are all these. Exactly. So. So that is. That, that is a. So remaining time. And what do we, how do we go forward? You know, we're like old guys now, right? And we, you know, maybe journalism will never go back to how we came up in the business, but what is it that you do to kind of get back both the trust of a lot of Americans, but also just pushing aside things that seem like self discrediting? I mean, the Charlie Kirk news cycle is kind of amazing to me in the sense that it's. Again, I understand why there was conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination because the assassin was murdered. So we didn't have a trial, but we have a trial now and it's all coming out. And like, you know, if you have a problem with it, take it up with the, you know, go to, you know what to the prosecutor, address the evidence, you know, but, but it's. Candace doesn't seem to be letting it go and others seem to. And it seems like this is going to still remain this huge story and I just don't understand why. So what, how do we get out of it?

[Matt Taibbi]

You know, I would have originally said that all these things eventually resolve themselves. That, you know, trust. Journalism is a trust business. Trust is, it's a human quality. You can't, you can't mechanize it. You can't make an algorithm that approximates it. It's just something that you have to do. And the only way you can gain trust with people is to show them over and over and over again that you care about what's correct and that these are, it's part of your value system that if you get something wrong, you'll admit it. If you get something really wrong multiple times, maybe you should take up something else for a living. I don't know. But that's how traditionally journalists looked at this. And they thought, okay, if we just try our best over and over again to, you know, get things right, then people will keep coming back to us eventually, right there, there will be, there will always be tulipomanias that pop up and people lose their minds about stuff. Unfortunately, that's kind of like the standard, you know, sort of product and trade right now is, is the mania. It's how people get paid in media is, is to try to drum up some kind of Internet fury about something and then ride the monetization wave all the way up. And the incentives for people to, to tell the, you know, sort of tell audiences a, a truth that might be partially disappointing or you Know, dramatically unsatisfying, it's gone. I, I just, I worry that, you know, unless we figure out a way for people to, to get more audience by being more careful, it's going to continue down this path. Also, we're not punishing politicians for doing this either. Right. Like, this is another thing you talked about, right. You know, in the Trump era, he's figured out that there you can say almost anything. But what he, the reason he wins is in elections is because he gives off this feeling of genuineness that the Democratic Party politicians often don't have. And so even though he might be factually incorrect, he's, he's scoring with people on some other level. And so we're not, we're not punishing politicians for saying untrue things either. And so that's, it's a very dangerous moment. I, I honestly, I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are like. I don't know, I don't know how many times.

[Eli Lake]

I'll give you one glimmer of hope. The big speech that Trump gave on Thursday night, which I think was generated basically through cherry picking intelligence reports,

[Unknown Introductory Speaker]

and

[Eli Lake]

it fizzled and it didn't, and you didn't really see a bunch of people in MAGA going crazy about the Chinese stole the 2020 election and all the things that Trump wanted to convey. It didn't really land. Now that might be a reflection of the fact that Trump's maybe kind of already a lame duck and, you know, the thrill is gone. But it might also mean that we've become somewhat ignored to the kind of spectacle of things like that. I mean, in some ways, I think, again, I don't have a problem with declassify more. I think we have too many state secrets, so I'm fine with that. But it was so obviously selectively declassified, which is that you could tell when you were going through it. You're like, wait a second, this is one guy. But what were the other people saying about this? And I don't even know what the source is he's referring to in China that tells him, you know, you know what I mean, you couldn't really evaluate it based on what they put out. So maybe it is true. I mean, I haven't, I don't put anything past the Chinese government. I mean, sure, sure, they're trying to do all kinds of things, but, so that to me was maybe a sign that we might be reaching. You know, we're, we're kind of getting past it and then hopefully we can get a Better set of leaders that hold themselves to the higher standard. And then again, I think that, I mean, I have no, I don't know, let's, let's devote the last part of this too. What's going on? I mean, do you think, do you see any hope for some of the major legacy media operations? I mean, there have been, there's an effort by the way, to, in the Washington Post to make the opinion page better. I think it is better, but that's the Opinion page there.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. And they're still getting killed financially.

[Eli Lake]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

The New York Times is doing better. Right. I mean, better relatively to Washington Post. But you know, that paper is still infuriating. It's sure it doesn't, it doesn't acknowledge its mistakes. It's overtly political. Like it seems like it sticks in almost like a Soviet style sub lead after the, the opening paragraph in almost every major news story. So that's depressing. And yeah, the people I see coming out of journalism school now have a completely different idea about what the job is than, you know, the people from, from our generation. And you know, I don't know that the old system, like I was very critical of the old objectivity system when I was coming up. I thought, you know, everything is an editorial choice right there. These papers and news and networks are always trying to push you in one direction or the other in subtle ways, but as an aspiration, actually, you know, now that I'm getting older, like I look back and I say, well, that wasn't the worst idea in the world. Right. It's good to have.

[Eli Lake]

No. And they competed for stories. So it's like Cyhersh went after Woodward and Bernstein and they tried to get the best, they tried to advance the story on Watergate. Right. That was great.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah, absolutely. And, and they were, and you know, they were doing it according to kind of established rules of warfare that, that all journalists accepted. It was, it was also, by the way, collegial in a way that the job isn't now. You know, when I worked overseas, you know, in Russia, all the correspondents knew one another one another. Even if we kind of went after each other publicly.

[Eli Lake]

You, you were notorious.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yes, I was.

[Eli Lake]

Back in the day.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. But, but even, even so, we got along pretty well actually with a lot of the other reporters. And, and the whole, the idea of kind of moving stories forward was, you know, a good one. I, I, it didn't be great. I wasn't upset when say, David Philippa for the Boston Globe got it, you know, got a scoop That I didn't. That doesn't, like, it's. It's not supposed to bother you when somebody else finds out something that's true. And now we have this thing that's just completely different. It's. It's just. It's only like sort of interpersonal warfare. And the. The issue of what's true and what's factually. Right. Is it feels like it's like a. At minimum, maybe a third or fourth level consideration for most.

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

Right.

[Matt Taibbi]

Most of these folks. Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

Right. Right. And you have, like, you know, I mean, I'm so glad we're hopefully done with the fact checking. Remember that. The independent fact checkers.

[Matt Taibbi]

God.

[Eli Lake]

And I'm like, you know what I call independent journalists?

[Matt Taibbi]

Journalism.

[Unknown Advertiser/Interjection Speaker]

Exactly.

[Matt Taibbi]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

Like, we don't need another set of. You know.

[Matt Taibbi]

But yeah, that was the weirdest thing ever. We're like. So we're going to have an entirely separate, you know, sort of organization that is going to tell you the same thing that we already told you in our pages. Implicitly. I don't know. That was weird. But, yeah.

[Eli Lake]

All right, well, this was great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I can. I just want to, you know, subscribe to Racket News, which is Matt's site. And you have incredible range, by the way. I love that you're. You're now kind of reading great books.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

Writing about them. I kind of wanted to. I want to start doing that myself, which is. I think it's a great excuse to sort of read the classics, but it's also very important to kind of like, use different muscles.

[Matt Taibbi]

Yeah. It's ground. It's grounding. I think one of the things I found our. Our audience tends to be kind of in the middle somewhere maybe, but they enjoy these little breaks from the part. The mania of media and, you know, old books have a lot to tell us, you know, still currently. So it's been a lot of fun doing that.

[Eli Lake]

Yeah, no, that's. So that's. That's been great. Anyway, thank you, Matt. This was a great conversation. I appreciate it.

[Matt Taibbi]

Thanks a lot, Eli.

[Unknown Introductory Speaker]

The five you got is next year's model, Lee Hobby. Odds, Irving Berlin. What happened once, happens again.