Matt Taibbi

I read that paragraph three times, but it must have been equipped with the 'journalistic equivalent of a childproof cap', because it resisted all my efforts to shake any sense out of it.

Basically he is annoyed that reporting on the drug comes with the caveat that it is “not an alternative to vaccines”

The only time Matt Taibbi is annoyed is when he feels like it's been too long (read: more than five minutes) since someone paid attention to him.

So then, because he has now read the same phrase repeated in multiple articles on the same subject, Matt Taibbi thinks the fact that he is annoyed is so important he needs to inform the world about his irritability. I think there are multiple words and phrases that have been invented to describe that attitude. None of them are compliments.

wake up, sheeple!

Matt Taibbi is a right wing troll. That substack article is heinous, he is promoting molnupiravir as a replacement for vaccination

Surprised no one pasted his appearance on Bill Maher's show into this thread. (I haven't watched it.)

How much stock in Merck does Taibbi own?

at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them

What is the evidence that the audience of Fox and OAN knows or understands even one single thing about anything.

This guy's a real fucking butthead if you ask me

The Fox News audience is probably like 98% rubes and 2% evil assholes; while the MSNBC audience is just 100% rubes

sometimes it feels like people decide whether or not they like a person before they decide whether or not they like what they said

Kinda leaves out that there are nuts blinded on the right shooting people over mask mandates and getting the jab, but hey whatever floats your cynical pocketbook heart Taibbi.

sometimes it feels like people decide whether or not they like a person before they decide whether or not they like what they said

well he's a piece of shit AND he says dumb stuff so either way

For those of you (seems like most of you) who didn't read the article:

1. Stop posting in this thread! Jeez. If all you have to add is a one-sentence dunk, consider skipping it and feel free to never open this thread again.
2. I think the point that Taibbi has been making is important. You could make the point that this has been going on forever - that the media is always pushing some sort of elite consensus viewpoint (and I think Taibbi has been beating this drum since the whole WMD fiasco). However, it does seem like Trump and COVID have amped this up to a new level.

Maybe it's a good idea. Maybe the existential threats of Trump and COVID mean that we have to keep contextualizing every story to highlight that angle. Or maybe this isn't the thing that Taibbi should focus his energy on (I'm sympathetic to this argument, but he is still reporting on banking malfeasance, corruption, etc.). However, I think the current awful media landscape is worth reporting on, and even though the abuses are way worse on the right, we should still be concerned about propaganda even when there is a Democrat in the White House.

Personally, these caveats and endless contextualization feels condescending, and Taibbi is right - NYT/WaPo readers already fucking get the context, and people in the right-wing media bubble think the NYT/WaPo are fake news anyway, so what is the point of all of it?

yeah, I don't think Taibbi is a right wing troll, but I do think the media criticism beat is pretty well covered by others. It seems to be pretty popular amongst Substack readers, though, and surely if you're paying your own expenses it makes more financial sense to read the news and critique rather than go out and do reporting.

But I agree with Sam Seder that when Taibbi makes hyperbolic claims, like that the media's crimes in Russiagate are as bad as or worse than the WMD ones, he's ignoring the consequences of those things. On the one hand you have a million or so dead humans. On the other, uh, some annoying Maddow monologues?

frankly the public has no need to hear about mulnipravir right now, the only reason it is in the news at all is because merck is legally obligated to report it before the data are formally published to prevent insider trading issues

in general I will agree that the press has done an awful job of covering the science, though the sort of protestant ethic taibbi seems to aspire to would almost certainly be even worse, as evidenced by just about everything taibbi has had to say about ivermectin and other “controversies”

What is irritating about Taibbi's substack is that the only posts he seems to make public are these ones about the media. I guess they drive traffic/get subscribers. A generous reading would be that he wants to lure people in with complaints about the MSM and then open their eyes to corruption, etc, with his non-public posts. A more probable reason is that Matt just wants more subscribers. In any case, that doesn't make him wrong, just provocative, I guess.

k3v otm

the media is bad but not for this reason

Maybe the existential threats of Trump and COVID mean that we have to keep contextualizing every story to highlight that angle.

Good thought! Keep it up.

Speaking of condescension.

The whole point was, who is this contextualization for? Why is the MSM talking down to their readers if they already get it? Are they hoping to attract dumber readers?

in general I will agree that the press has done an awful job of covering the science

I wouldn't agree with that at all! This stuff is complicated and I think the press has done a -- to me -- unexpectedly good job of being upfront about the difficulties and inherent uncertainties involved.

who is this contextualization for?

I see you have already forgotten how quickly the vast majority of Americans forget almost every fucking thing that has happened since 9/11. And they remember 9/11 because they get constant reminders.

The MSM isn't hoping to attract dumber readers. They are simply acknowledging the brutal fact that without constant contextualization, their readers will lose the context amid the constant torrent of garish stimuli competing for their eyes, ears and minds. Take for example, the January 6th insurrection and the massive and enduring shadow it still casts over every aspect of national politics.

I'm ok with that. It's when the contextualization turns into spin or even straight up lying that it needs to be called out.

The whole point was, who is this contextualization for?

It's for the 30-40 percent of the public — and a much larger percent of the online public — that grabs onto every single news story that can in any way be bent to show that a.) COVID is not as bad as "they" say it is, b.) vaccines don't really work, and/or c.) your dumb lazy ass is perfectly justified in continuing to ignore and make fun of the whole situation. Taibbi is acting like there is not a very real, powerful and consistent effort out there to minimize COVID and discourage vaccination. Maybe he just doesn't have those people in his social media feeds, I don't know, but it's a very real thing and it is directly connected to our still stupidly low vaccination rates.

So on this one, I think he's just wrong and doesn't understand the context, whereas the reporters who are writing about the health/science side of the pandemic are inundated by that bullshit every single day.

You should have seen how overjoyed my local Republican state legislators were when that Israeli study came out suggesting that previous infection gives better protection than vaccination — they were 100 percent reposting it to justify not getting vaccinated, as if the best route is for everybody to just go ahead and get COVID, because if you survive, you'll be less likely to catch it a second time.

i feel like the parallel argument to this is "how dare you combat misinformation, we have a right to be misinformed bc free speech"

don't read the comments -- that's exactly how many of them interpreted Taibbi (among other horrors).

OK you made me read the piece! It is not, in my opinion, good. If you want to insist "the masters of elite media have determined that molnupiravir has incorrect political tendencies and the official organs turned on it within 24 hours," sure, you can find articles with caveats, but -- is this really general? I am online all the time and I had no sense of the existence of a molnupiravir backlash until I saw Taibbi's curated examples. In my media environment, which is pretty mainstream, it's all "this drug reduces hospitalization by 50% and that's good news after a bunch of high-profile failures e.g. convalescent plasma." Like here's coverage from October 5, by which point, per Taibbi, elite consensus to ivermectinize molnupiravir was locked in. Headline is "Everything You Need to Know About Merck’s Game-Changing Covid Pill."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-05/why-a-new-pill-to-treat-covid-could-be-a-game-changer-quicktake

"This drug doesn't eliminate the need for a vaccine" appears in this piece, but as #7 out of 7 bullet points, not exactly the main theme.

yeah but they're so condescending about it

I hadn't even heard that the convalescent plasma thing was a bust.

DJI, you're cool, but I'd be more engaged if Taibbi had something meaningful to contribute. He's the opposite: he gives ammo to Trumpists.

could it be that matt taibbi is prone to seek out bias-confirming details and weight them differently than details that do not align with his existing inclinations? if so, this is perfectly normal for average humans thinking about anything. but matt taibbi does not claim to be no better than average at evaluating information. if he's no better at it than his readers, he'd be out of a job. he implicitly claims to be an expert evaluator and interpreter of global events, not some shlub who's as lazy at thinking as everyone else.

if he's no better at it than his readers, he'd be out of a job.

on second thought, I was wrong. many a commentator on current events gains and keeps an audience by being exactly as lazy a thinker as his readers, by confirming their biases for them, but doing it with style and a level of polish and articulation they could not achieve on their own. it's the bread and butter for most politicians, too.

Alfred - I agree that this new work of his has attracted a bunch of confirmation-bias-seeking CHUDs. I don't think that is the point of it all, though. I think the point of a lot of this work is trying to figure out how to break down the different media bubbles that we inhabit, and keeping the MSM honest is an important piece of that. Or maybe it's a lost cause...

Eephus - good point about him maybe looking too hard to find a way to make his point.

Taibbbbi's been doing this all through COVID, last year he wrote about how "no one was talking" about Sweden's COVID response when in fact there had been a lot of media coverage.

I think people who are on Twitter a lot tend to do that - assume because they hear too little/too much about something in their (personalized!) Twitter feed, that NOBODY/EVERYBODY is talking about it.

DJI, but what is Taibbi getting right that other COVID-covering journalists aren't?

I hadn't even heard that the convalescent plasma thing was a bust.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, October 8, 2021 1:56 PM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's too bad, it was perfectly reasonable to hope this would be helpful but so far no dice

https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2021/09/large-study-finds-convalescent-plasma-doesn%E2%80%99t-help-seriously-ill-covid-19-patients

DJI, but what is Taibbi getting right that other COVID-covering journalists aren't?

his name

DJI, but what is Taibbi getting right that other COVID-covering journalists aren't?

Hilarious response as always, DJP.

I think he is getting at the frustration that some of us have with feeling like we are being manipulated, lied to, talked down to, etc.

Here's an example - I still don't think we've gotten a good answer to the simplest question: Has anyone ever actually gotten COVID while outdoors? What I've seen from the media is a lot of "these outdoor events were associated with COVID outbreaks (but they had indoor bathrooms, or everyone also went to indoor bars and restaurants), so keep masking up outdoors just in case!"

Or, how dangerous is COVID compared to the seasonal flu for kids under 12? I have not seen a straight answer to that. Anything approaching an answer to either of these questions is so larded up with caveats and context that it seems more like propaganda than science or journalism.

Has anyone ever actually gotten COVID while outdoors?

The trouble is, there are very few cases of COVID where we can definitively say when, where, and from whom the person contracted the disease. But outdoor transmission is generally thought to be very rare relative to indoor transmission

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html

And... that's the message I get from reading the mainstream media, like the New York Times piece above! I really don't think "keep masking up outdoors just in case" is a message enforced by media mandarins. I will admit that this more recent Times piece

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/well/live/covid-delta-variant-vaccine-symptoms.html

says "Most experts agree that you don’t need to wear a mask outdoors if you’re not in a crowd and have plenty of distance (at least six feet) from people whose vaccination status isn’t known" which suggests that you MIGHT need to wear a mask if you're outdoors and NOT distanced; well, all I can say is I live in an ultra-blue city where everybody reads the New York Times and NPR and next to nobody is masked outside.

Or, how dangerous is COVID compared to the seasonal flu for kids under 12? I have not seen a straight answer to that.

Both create minimal, I would even say negligible risk of illness at the level that requires hospitalization. Again, I think this information is presented pretty straight in places like New York Times, Washington Post, etc. There is the complicating issue of whether there might be long-term sequelae for kids I guess, but I've started to feel like that's kind of an unknowable at this point, and not because the media's being suppressive about it.

The issue with kids is always framed wrong, for deliberate reasons by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Yes, kids are less likely to get seriously ill or die from COVID, BUT they can certainly carry COVID and spread it to non-kids.

yes

I think he is getting at the frustration that some of us have with feeling like we are being manipulated, lied to, talked down to, etc.

are you really one of these people?

The CDC wants to avoid a mass panic or mass outbreak. I have been having coffee and meals outdoors for at least a year -- way before vaccines. Not once did I think the CDC was lying to me. Instead, I thought, well, I'm one person who doesn't take any other COVID-related risks except the hour I'm going to sit at my bookstore cafe outside with a coffee or salad. I'll be the first to admit the CDC waited too long to finally acknowledge in April and May that outdoor anything presents little risk -- those of us who protested masked last year knew this -- but, you know, so fucking what?

xxp OMG yes. We know this. Thanks for caveating and contextualizing my post, just in case, for some insane reason, I don't already know that.

This reminds me of the acquaintance who told me in March that "We can't tell you how fucking good these vaccines are" because he was afraid it would make unvaccinated people more reluctant to take them. Well, uh, here we are.

the acquaintance works on the epidemiological staff at my local public university, I should point out. He also said in March that the vaccines were so good we could "more or less" return to normal if everyone else got'em too.

Well, uh, here we are.