Matt Taibbi
speaker
214 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Matt Taibbi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The story is no longer the boss.
Instead, we sell narrative in a dysfunctional new business model.
Once the commercial strategy of the news business was to go for the whole audience, a TV news broadcast was aired at dinnertime, and it was designed to be watched by the entire family, everyone from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulking lefty teenager in the corner.
This system had flaws, but making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits.
For one thing, it inspired trust.
Gallup polls twice, twice showed Walter Cronkite to be the most trusted person in all of America.
That would never happen with a news reader today.
With the arrival of the Internet, some outlets found that instead of going after the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and try to dominate it.
How do you do that?
That's easy.
You just pick an audience and feed it news you know they'll like.
Instead of starting with a story and following the facts, you start with what pleases your audience and work backward to the story.
This process started with Fox, but really now everybody does it.
From CNN to AN to the Washington Post, nearly all media organizations are in the same demographic hunting business.
According to a Pew Center survey from a few years ago, 93% of Fox's audience votes Republican,
In an exactly mirroring phenomenon, 95% of the MSNBC audience votes Democratic.
The New York Times readers are 91% Democrats.
Left or right, most commercial audiences, in America anyway, are politically homogenous.
This bifurcated system is fundamentally untrustworthy.
When you decide in advance to forego half of your potential audience to cater to the other half, you're choosing in advance which facts to emphasize and which to downplay, based on considerations other than truth or newsworthiness.
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