Or it could do the opposite. Both Taibbi and Shellenberger are independent investigative journalists with no party loyalties. Their funding comes directly from readers rather than corporations or billionaire owned outlets. They can make a few mistakes from time to time but own up to them. Their opinions are their own, but they rarely report anything not factual.
Um, among the "mistakes" Taibbi recently "owned up to" is falsifying information in his Twtter Files reporting. Among other things, he deliberately misrepresented mentions of the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS) as the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It's clear that was not a mistake, but a choice he made in order to further a specific narrative - one that he only admitted when confronted about it. [1]
Two minor and inconsequential errors that he owned up to even before the segment aired.
This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the government contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach.
Per SCOTUS, working through an intermediary is not a loophole around the First Amendment. For purposes of regulating free speech, a government contractor IS the government.
So yes, in hundreds of tweets and articles reporting the Twitter Files, there were a couple errors that Taibbi instantly corrected. That's how you build trust and integrity with readers. It's what MSNBC, CNN, and FOX almost never do.
Taibbi deliberately edited the text he was quoting in a way that changed its entire meaning in order to support the claim he was making. And after having the "mistake" pointed out, it was weeks later that he "just discovered" his "mistake". The article at Techdirt I linked explains this, along with how Taibbi misrepresenting 22 million tweets one Election Integrity Partnership report tracked for their own work as being the same as the under 3000 tweets they flagged to Twitter, and how he lied about how the Biden campaign was able to report non-consensual Hunter Biden porn to Twitter during the 2020 election campaign.
If it makes you feel better, you can see it as a prominent and controversial journalist on a high-profile story making a number of elementary but significant errors that just happened to support his preferred view, instead of him deliberately misrepresenting facts to push an agenda, but neither interpretation does a anything good for his credibility as a journalist.
What is your proof that he "deliberately" edited the text to change the entire meaning rather than just misstated it? As others pointed out above, this edit/mistake doesn't seem to negate his claim given that the two agencies were working together in this regard.
Regardless of if they were mistakes or not, there is more than enough found in the Twitter Files to be concerned about. It would have been much more interesting to hear Medhi discuss the substance of Tabbi's work. Instead he tried to discredit everything by cornering him on air with small details that Taibbi clearly wasn't prepared to fact check live.
Given the timeline of events in reporting on the Twitter Files, it seems likely that Taibbi et al were working long hours, digging through thousands of emails and messages, trying to piece together what was happening at Twitter over the previous 4 years. Typing one letter wrong in an acronym, among hundreds of acronyms they had been seeing in emails, doesn't surprise me. They were essentially live tweeting their research.
Also, Taibbi and others responded to this claim that he exaggerated the 3000 tweets as 22 million tweets. https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644111356709289993. It was not 3000 tweets but rather 3000 URLs that they targeted for removal by removing any tweets containing those URLs. Seems like many reporters are making mistakes to support their preferred claim here.
The claim that the funding doesn't come from a "billionaire owned outlet" doesn't really track if you look at the investors[0] in Substack. I count at least one billionaire-run fund in that list.
There was also an incident a couple months ago where Elon Musk accused Taibbi of working for Substack, which he denied, but in leaked texts says they "originally hired" him[1], which I find confusing.
FFS this is like claiming you are funded by BoA or JPM if your salary is deposited there.
They are literally paid by their subscribers, Substack is a mere payment & publication tool. Substack do not pay them.
Moreover w.r.t. Taibbi he has picked fights with his employers and quit at the first hint of them trying to influence his work. His credibility on that front is actually excellent and better than anyone at the NYT, for example (Who may be excellent but can't point to a history like that).
"When we started Substack in mid-2017, the future for writers was frightening. [...] We started experimenting with advances, paying a small number of writers sums ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 to cover them for a few months as they got established on Substack. [...] With Substack Pro, we pay a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform. [...] In return for that financial security, a Pro writer agrees to let Substack keep 85% of the subscription revenue in that first year."
If we're discussing Freddy De Boer this is relevant. He was on that deal. Which they won't renew and can't easily withdraw fwiw. Kinda different to being fired by Rupert Murdoch. Or having your story spiked, when it was 100% true but went against "the narrative" when that narrative was also false.
Do you have evidence that Taibbi is on this deal and has lied about it? Because that's a huge claim to make.
Huh. I didn't know Taibbi made a big deal about not taking the salary up front. I misread your comment to mean "substack doesn't pay any of its writers, they all make their money off subscription" and couldn't resist the citation.
Claiming that a private company with significant investment in it has "owners" is not controversial. It's unclear to me why this bothers you so much. This isn't intended as an attack on Taibbi whatsoever, it is just plain wrong to say that a for-profit company funded by some of the largest SV funds is not an owned entity.
You can make the case that because Substack writers do not have an editorial process and fact checking that it is distinct from other news outlets and you'd be correct, but it doesn't change the fact that it is a platform that billionaire(s) have a financial interest in.
Taibbi is paid by his subscribers. The end. He's not influenced by the vendors of his pen or his pc or any of his other suppliers. Each of those supplier companies has owners and nobody need care.
If substack the company don't like his writing and try /anything/ at all, he takes _his_ business away from substack. Substack work for Taibbi. Taibbi is the customer. Substack have as much influence on the stories he reports as your bank rep does on your work. Substack's owners are wholly irrelevant.
The point is that Substack is completely, totally and utterly beside the point when it comes to journalistic influence & integrity. It's unclear to me how you are missing this point. The ownership of substack has zero relevance here. None. As opposed the ownership of the WSJ and Fox News (or msnbc, cnn, nyt, etc) which clearly and obviously is extremely relevant to the output of any journalist /employed/ by those companies.
You're making the claim that Substack is making no money on the subscriptions? And that the infrastructure they provide to process these subscriptions is completely decoupled from their company to the point that if they banned a writers account their subscribers are totally portable? This is an impressive feat, if true.
Taibbi pays bank fees. And tax. And his isp. And for stationary. And substack to provide his cms and payment gateway. He is the customer in /all/ of those transactions.
There is no credible claim of substack trying to influence writers. Unsurprisingly substack is used by wonderful journalists and idiotic charlatans alike.
Glenn Greenwald has left substack for locals for his own reasons, i don't think he has any argument with substack. Seems to have been frictionless including transfer of subscriber credit from one platform to another.
Mainstream media has "owners" who "fire" editors when they don't like the stories being written. Journalist pitch stories at those editors. See Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London, The News of the World, The Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. For example, note how many times Tony Blair and separately Gordon Brown sought audiences with Rupert Murdoch.
You subscribe to the NYT or WSJ you use whatever payment gateway they set up and you read content using whatever CMS they employ.
You don't subscribe to substack it isn't possible.
You subscribe to say Racket (which is Taibbi) or separately Shellenberger and use whatever payment gateway they each seperatly set up and you read content using whatever CMS they employ. Substack is a service provider and one they can easily leave as Glenn Greenwald has in the shift of his news service to locals and rumble.
So with this information you can start making better arguments.
>The claim that the funding doesn't come from a "billionaire owned outlet" doesn't really track if you look at the investors[0] in Substack.
That's your claim to which I objected. It is nonsense. Your linked article above is ridiculous and has /nothing/ whatever to do with that claim. Don't admit it, just acknowledge you got it totally wrong. Easy.
Individual reporters making money with a blog (instead of employment with a news outlet) certainly have worse fact checking. The best news sources in the world have huge fact checking teams that help to verify everything. This small mistakes that Tabbi made would be much less likely to slip if he were part of a major news org.
I'm old enough to remember when any journalist who didn't check their facts wasn't worth reading for anything beyond entertainment value. P.J. O'Rouke would need someone to do the work for him. Sy Hersh, not so much.
I look at Taibbi's work and haven't found uncorrected error. NYT? WaPo? Well it's not fair, there are orders of magnitude more opportunities for them to mess it up but yep, they sure have, often, on stories Taibbi didn't.
It's weird how many smart people still haven't realized they are being lied to by the legacy media and establishment figures. Even after repeatedly discrediting themselves.
Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.
Step one is realizing that the establishment lies to you.
Step two is recognizing that the other guys are more than happy to lie to you too, or lie to themselves, and have an even easier time of it due to lack of vetting.
The problem is that when you are leaning towards believing something anyway and find out that you were being lied to about it, you don't become more critical of all information, just information that is in conflict with what 'seems' right to you.
It is a terrible side-effect of doing things like teaching kids in the 80s and 90s that marijuana was a terrible drug because when they find out it isn't, then everything else they said is suspect and any authority that tries to say anything about drugs gets treated with suspicion.
In line with this, using fear of the worst possible outcome in order to scare people backfires heavily if it doesn't happen because then convincing them of anything related to that subject again is going to have to come from a completely different source and direction.
Often new, independent journalists will claim that the mainstream media is lying to the citizens and when I replace "mainstream media" with "my competitors" it makes a lot more sense.
"My competitors are lying to you" is a variation of the "my competitors have a bad product" claim that I imagine many small businesses make to discredit the market leader.
Does it mean that the market leaders have a better product? Not necessarily, but I don't automatically trust a business to be honest about its competitors, especially if the business is new and gets market share by directly attacking its competitors.
All levels of aptitude/intelligence are equally likely to be conned because a con works by getting your emotions to turn your intelligence to the task of tricking you.
For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
> For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
But you might be better at that the more intelligent you are. E.g. I understand there's an established result that professional ethicists and ethics researchers act less ethically than the average person on average, because they find it easier to come up with excuses for how what they wanted to do was actually ethical.
Agreed! However, you're missing that the higher your aptitude, the higher the bar for tricking yourself.
So yes, a very intelligent person can come up with a sophisticated justification to trick themselves. A less intelligent person will come up with a less sophisticated narrative. Both people work on the con till it's enough to pass their bar, which is why I say it's a factor of desire rather than reason.
A restatement might be: There is "book smart" intelligence and "street smart" intelligence. People without a lot of street smarts but a lot of book smarts are probably easier to con.
> Taibbi is clearly a partisan hack that only attacks one side, ever.
You should probably expand your reading to his articles in Rolling Stone, particularly those from 4-5 years ago. You would not say “ever” if you did that. But…for a writer that admittedly leans left in his politics, he is willing to call out that side when a story leads there.
He is much like Glenn Greenwald in that respect. Both he and Glenn get a lot of hate from folks on the left for daring to stray from the left messaging orthodoxy.
He falls into the class of writers who claims to lean left but in the past years has actually been a pretty obvious supporter of the right. This is a transparent yet effective schtick - for some reason people never question the framing of "even so-and-so is willing to call out their own side".
I think you might be over generalizing “the right”. He certainly aligns on specific things with the right, but not everything—only where there is common overlap to his personal politics. Same as on the left…
It’s ok to be on a “side” and still be critical of that side. No one would rightly accuse Bill Maher or Jimmy Dore of being conservatives, but they are damn sure critical of certain perspectives as of late of the American left.
It's fascinating to see what different bubbles we live in. I and most everyone I respect and run into the opinions of would consider Maher and Dore small-c conservatives.
Bizarre. Both were very vocal supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016/2020 DNC primaries and have multiple occasions pushed democratic socialism as their ideal political paths for America, but because they are also occasionally critical of leftist authoritarianism tactics or ineptitude of democratic politicians they get lumped to be conservative?
I guess if your bubble is pulling it’s identity from the leftist dogma du jour anyone who departs from that orthodoxy would be dismissed as conservative.
Did they shift their opinions…or did the left simply shift leftward so that democratic socialism proponents now seem conservative? I’d argue that most probably did not shift their politics and opinion, but the definition of who is left and who is right changed—at least from the “orthodox” left’s perspective.
Amazing that in 2023, Bernie Sanders and his supporters are now considered conservative.
Democratic socialism is not conservative. There's this specific weird case that a number of Sanders' prominent supporters turned out to be really weird people. A number of them, including Brienna Joy Gray, are supporting RFK Jr in the upcoming election. This is an example of how politics doesn't map perfectly onto a left-right line.
> This is an example of how politics doesn't map perfectly onto a left-right line
That really is my point, the center political position is always arbitrary…in general and on any given single political opinion. So most normal people don’t break exactly along the dogmatic lines set by whatever is the governing authority of right and left.
My political opinion is driven above all else by pragmatism that does not break cleanly in right or left or by party. As such where i sit on the political spectrum is always relative to the person evaluating my opinion.
Since COVID, I find the who left and right thing hugely confusing.
I used to identify as left, and would still do that, except that what passed for left-leaning news during COVID became nothing more than propaganda, and left-leaning journalist put their investigative and sceptical credentials to one side.
During COVID, and still perhaps even now, it turns out you can become a member of the far right, just by staying politically still.
> Since COVID, I find the who left and right thing hugely confusing.
There really seem to be some strange shifts recently in the US where the democrats have become quite a bit more hawkish and intolerant of alternative opinions than I have ever seen before in my lifetime.
Couldn't have anything to do with the lack of action against constant mass shootings, police brutality, regressions in law's around women's bodies, the attacks on LGBTQ rights, no couldn't be.
Honestly, fuck outta here with "alternative opinions" noise.
I get the feeling they are just disappointed in where liberalism has shifted and their recent work is calling out that discomfort.
My reading of both is quite honestly the exact opposite of what you describe, they tend to call out the authoritarianism they see no matter the side. Frankly even Taibbi’s recent foray into Government and Twitter is more an indictment of a government’s overreach into controlling speech which is very authoritarian in action. That series spoke about both Trump and Biden’s administrations attempting to control public discourse. It certainly feels like it was more critical to the Biden admin, and that might help the GOP…but that might be because there was a lot more evidence of it provided to him.
I think Greenwald started his rightward journey with "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", or at least, an acceptance of the fact that right-wing media were the only people willing to platform him criticizing the centrist consensus, even when he was still criticizing it from the left. But over time he's been so love-bombed by right-wing media that he's actually switched sides.
I disagree about a lot of the rest of what you say, but I think you're on point with regard to Taibbi and Greenwald.
Chomsky isn't a fascist. He's just stuck in the mid-late 20th century anti-Vietnam-era paradigm and thinks everything that happens in the world is always America's fault. He hasn't updated his view of the world since the 1980s at best.
> Their funding comes directly from readers rather than corporations or billionaire owned outlets
... is also problematic.
If I build a following of people with certain views, I'm aware that if I don't reach the conclusions they expect, they'll go away and take my funding with them.
The subsection 6 that you quoted is under the section:
3011. (a) In making a determination of the best interests of the child in a proceeding described in Section 3021, the court shall, among any other factors it finds relevant and consistent with Section 3020, consider all of the following
For example, another subsection is
(3) The nature and amount of contact with both parents, except as provided in Section 3046
This has absolutely nothing to do with falling under child abuse.
This list of articles is right out of a conspiracy theorists fever dream. Great intellectual content here HN, thanks for sharing. Now go outside and take a walk before you go off the deep end.
So this list is perfectly sane then I suppose, it’s as simple as that. I think the reason so many people like this stuff is they get to pretend they’re smarter than everyone and have the real information. You see, they did the research. They are big brained and everyone else is too stupid to understand. A convenient fit for a “smartest person in the room” fantasy. Authors like this provide fuel for that fantasy.
So what? Anything bad happens, people have many theories that go against the official narrative, from quite possible, to absolute idiocracies, from "Epstein didn't hang himself" to flat-earthers, from usa involvement in iran coup to "bush did 9/11"...
Somehow we have netflix documentaries about flat earthers (even if making fun about them), discovery channel has "documentaries" about ancient aliens, mermaids, ghosts, etc., but a "lab leak theory" has to be censored everywhere.
It's because he makes constant clearly incorrect scientific claims, says conspiratorial things about vaccines that are obviously wrong. We haven't hidden the deaths of millions of people who got the COVID vaccine. We just haven't. And for all the billions of people who got the vaccine, I'm sure there were a handful of people that had serious reactions. But contrast that with the millions of people who literally died just in the US. He is trying to reverse that equation and claiming that it's all a big secret with no evidence, that's the problem with people like him.
And he's been doing it since before Covid, and still spouts the lies about links (which don't actually exist) between vaccinations and increased rates of diagnosed autism.
Let's be fair... the vaccine conspiracies have a lot of backing by the gaslightng of our own government and media. I live in a small country of slovenia, we didn't approve any of the russian or chinese vaccines, so for normal people, there were four options - astrazeneca, J&J, moderna and pfeizer vaccines. All of them were marketed as safe, the marketing material from our government was that the 90-95% of the vaccinated won't get a symptomatic covid, and that everyone should get vaccinated "now", with any of the vaccines.
Then a few people died nearby, and astrazeneca was temporarily removed from the list of options and wasn't recommended anymore. But the other three vaccines were safe and effective.
Then a young girl died here from from a J&J vaccine (the popular choice, due to it being a single-shot one), and we stopped using that. Suddenly the "classic" vaccines were not ok anymore, and the "all four are safe and effective" became "you should get a mRNA vaccine".
Then a bunch of young men ended up with heart issues after the moderna vaccine, and suddenly only pfizer is "safe and effective".
Also the "95% chance you won't get symptomatic covid" became a slightly "lower chance of hospitalizaton or death".
All of this of course came after the "masks are ineffective and you don't need them" that almost literally overnight (it was over a weekend) changed to "masks are mandatory in xyz places".
I mean sure.... science, conspiracies... but if you want to fuel a conspiracy theory, the best way to do it is to say something, then change what you said, and ban people who continue saying what you said a few days earlier.
> It is perhaps noteworthy that this is the writing form that a lot of mainstream news articles take (advantage of?).
No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that. There's room for argument about the use of anonymous sourcing, but there's a huge difference between "someone involved in the decision process" or "with knowledge of the events" (commonly used descriptions) and what the authors did here, which amounts to "someone who works for the US government anywhere, but we won't tell you their expertise".
But yes: a lot of it is about trust. We trust editors at NYT and WaPo to make sure their journalists know who their sources are and not to lie or spin about them. And while, sure, sometimes this process breaks, on the whole it's worked very well for a very long time.
Throwing it out the window so that someone can get clicks on substack posts, or (worse) because you don't like the political implications of the trusted journalism, is a really bad idea. A world of Fox and Substack, where "sincerely held opinions" take the place of "truth", is sort of a disaster.
>No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that.
Many did it with Adrian Zenz ad nauseum and there's a few other outliers i've noticed. It's kinda silly.
People claim he's the target of a chinese disinformation campaign but he couldn't be an easier target if he tried.
From his far right political views to taking a number from a dubious source to begin with, rounding up a ton and then listing an even higher number or quoting numbers from a more reputable paper and adding some extra zeroes because what's a decimal point even? One would chalk it up to a mistake if he didn't pull constant weird mistakes in his favour.
> No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that. There's room for argument about the use of anonymous sourcing, but there's a huge difference between "someone involved in the decision process" or "with knowledge of the events" (commonly used descriptions) and what the authors did here, which amounts to "someone who works for the US government anywhere, but we won't tell you their expertise".
"Anonymous sources" is a superior attack vector - it is well psychologically established as "normal/righteous", and it allows one complete free reign on weaving a believable tale for the public to update their local simulation with, no risk from your sources being exposed as bogus.
> But yes: a lot of it is about trust. We trust editors at NYT and WaPo to make sure their journalists know who their sources are and not to lie or spin about them.
Some people believe this, but I don't.
In fact, I think it is rather interesting how so many people have been trained to think this way, and no one notices how weird it is.
> And while, sure, sometimes this process breaks, on the whole it's worked very well for a very long time.
"Measured" (but not actually) on a relative scale.
> Throwing it out the window so that someone can get clicks on substack posts, or (worse) because you don't like the political implications of the trusted journalism, is a really bad idea.
You predict that it is a bad idea, you do not actually have any way to know this.
Imagine driving a car that is modified such that the front window is not a window, but rather a screen containing an extremely well known to be inaccurate simulation of the road - would this not make you nervous?
> A world of Fox and Substack, where "sincerely held opinions" take the place of "truth", is sort of a disaster.
The problem isn't just Fox and Substack, the root problem is humans/consciousness/culture.
Yep. I aw that. But then I rely on the trustworthiness of the authors, and when I know for a fact at least one of them has been caught literally making up lies that, when uncovered, literally disprove the narrative they were pushing, it really destroys all credibility.
He was not “caught literally making up lies”. There was an error in his reporting. Perhaps he lied, perhaps he made a mistake. Please don’t turn to hyperbole.
Or at least show me the evidence for his lies(not errors, which are not the same thing. Lies require an intent to misconstrue).
[1] https://substack.com/@shellenberger