Matt Taibbi
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Taibbi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I remember when I covered Wall Street, I was constantly told that you can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it. They'll turn the page. But it's not true. People have a great hunger to find out things and they have... a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine.
And so when they do these sort of transparent exercises in lying and PR and political propaganda, and they think that people won't notice, it makes it worse. The numbers are going to go down rather than up when they start. Totally. Don't you think?
Absolutely. You think so? Oh, 100%. I think that. I think that especially when you're talking about interventionist military policies, whether or not they've been effective. Try pitching stories to one of the big newspapers about... You know, maybe some kind of downside to an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of, you know, a thousand military bases in the Middle East or whatever it is.
Drone warfare, like, you know, you're going to have a hard time selling that one, right?
Yeah, and it's worse in TV than it is in print, but it shouldn't be, right? And I got the same thing. I mean, not so much at Rolling Stone, but I remember we did one story where our plan was to do one story on what caused the financial crisis. And we got such an overwhelming response because it wasn't anywhere. People could not read anywhere.
Right, but it wasn't so much what I was doing. It was just the fact of, you know, how does this work? Who was really profiting by it? What happened to the people who bought these homes? Et cetera, et cetera. Just basic questions, and people wanted to know. And as you discover, they want to know other things. Where are they spending the money that I send every year that goes to the Pentagon?
That's right. Right? How does it disappear into a black hole and it's not auditable and that's okay?
Yeah, those were the good old days when the manias were things like the summer of the shark, right?
Yeah. Why didn't we do that? Honestly. And it came as a shock to a lot of people. Like, a complete shock. Were you in the country when that happened? No, I was in Russia.
That's a terrifying feeling, right? You got to cover something that you have no background in.
Right.
Yeah.
Right, right. And, you know, there are a lot of people who didn't ask basic questions before. In the last eight years. I've noticed.
Well, it becomes overwhelming after a while. That's right. I mean, you know, the 50th time they tell you that democracy is going to end in 10 minutes or, you know, you're going to die if you don't, you know, take this medicine or whatever it is or, you know, your kids are going to die. Yeah. It emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult.
I mean, I think this was a factor in, it was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because the audiences were not, they were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them. So it's going to take a while for people to digest a lot of these things.
I think it's happening slowly, but what's going to be interesting about this period is that there's going to be this avalanche of primary material that's going to come out. And I'm fascinated. I can't wait. You're going to need to hire more staff to keep up with it all. Yeah, probably that's the case. And it's going to be a fun time for journalists like me.
But just as a citizen, I can't wait to read it, you know? So can I ask one last question?
I mean, I think the thing that happened last year with that frenzied week in July with Biden and, you know, and the lying about the poll numbers and the phony, the clearly planted stories about Nancy Pelosi. Lying about the poll numbers?
Look, there were stories that Biden was ahead in the polls that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire. NPR did a story like virtually, I believe it was a couple of days after the debate. I'll have to go back and look at this. But there were stories that he was doing fine in the polls. And of course, we later found out from...
Biden staffers that they said they never had... I'm sorry, that was about Kamala. They never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead, even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite, which is... For me, the story that I just can't get past is what happened in that one week. And how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it?
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