Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Uh, really, I was only asked one question, uh, really by a Democrat, the entire hearing, which went on for hours. So, um, why were you there and what was the point?
I think Jim Jordan really wanted to underscore that there are continuing issues with the censorship landscape, which coincidentally, Vice President Vance talked about this week, a lot of it having to do with the integration of the United States with sort of foreign and especially European driven censorship regimes like the Digital Services Act or the Online Safety Act or Germany's NetzDG Act.
And the United States is still basically in conflict with a lot of those countries and suppressing a lot of forces within our own country that want those kinds of measures here in the US.
And there's an angle here that's kind of funny. I think the AP doesn't understand that to a certain extent, Trump is trolling exactly them. The AP style book is essentially the glossary of accepted terminology that the entire print journalism industry uses. And when I first started off in print journalism, the style book was fairly static. It would change every now and then.
But recently it's become this thing where there are changes constantly where they advise you,
oh try to avoid using the work the word woke if you if you can because it's used in a derogatory fashion by conservatives uh don't refer to the uh sex at birth of a transgender person if you can avoid doing that they're constantly instructing you on usages that go far beyond things like grammar or official names and trump by naming the gulf of mexico the gulf of america like i don't know how i feel about that personally but it's incredibly clear that he's
sort of returning in kind, that kind of stuff. And for them to throw a fit over this, it's silly on two levels. Number one, I came up in independent journalism. Nobody ever gave me a credential. You don't need a credential to be a journalist. You can do it, as you say, Megan, from where you are. We're supposed to be on the outside. The tantrum is ridiculous.
But the second thing is they do this constantly. That's what they do. And they're being called out on it.
Yeah, I mean, I was advised as a young reporter by, you know, some people who are kind of legendary investigative reporters at the time. Look, if you want friends, you can't stay in this business. This is a business where you're going to lose friends. And if you try to keep them, you're probably not doing your job correctly.
So get used to having a pretty narrow social life and then you'll be fine. And I think, you know, Walter is talking about, I mean, a lot of people in Washington talk about this concept of the blob, which is everybody you meet is married to somebody else who's a lobbyist.
And there are these interlocking relationships where every transaction that you see, whether it's a piece of legislation that gets passed or, you know, an executive order, there's a whole bunch of hidden connections that the public doesn't get to see. which is, you know, it's questionable. I think it needs to be reported on, but it's worse when the reporters are part of the equation.
Like, I think all of that internecine, behind the scenes, all those relationships, it's really bad if the reporters are part of that sort of hidden network. They shouldn't be. They should be on the outside. And that way you can trust the stuff that you see on the air much more.
Yeah, I think you're right, Megan. I'm not a lawyer, but I think everybody, obviously, if you don't feel that you can in good conscience bring that case, then resigning is what you should do. But it's the same for a whole string of stories.
that we've seen over the years and then, you know, like Gary Shapley, the IRS whistleblower, like they, they know when they come forward that they're not going to be working, uh, you know, in, in government anymore. Right. Um, so you, it's essentially resigning, right. When you come forward and you can't come back.
Yeah, I mean, the selective outrage factor in all this is pretty conspicuous. I mean, like, it goes both ways, but they massively overreported, I think, a lot of the Trump cases, you know, particularly the one in New York, with such an obviously politicized case.
And there was no coverage in that direction, really examining how ridiculous and how what a Frankenstein Ian legal construction that indictment was. But you know, when when you have a person of conscience and the other side now and now it becomes, you know, a soccer of type of story. They didn't cover the FBI whistleblowers or the IRS whistleblowers the same way.
And that's just the way it's going to be going forward. I mean, we're in a fractured society right now.
I mean, this has been going on for a long time, this kind of journalism by implication. It started, I think, really with the Russiagate stuff where, I mean, remember we had a cover story in New York Magazine that suggested Donald Trump would have been recruited by the KGB before the village people, basically. And it was just based on a hunch. Let's look at all these dots, these connections.
Could he be a Russian agent? Is there a Manchurian candidate in the White House? That's how they do it. It's journalism by question. I'm not saying that he's drinking bourbon, but could he be drinking bourbon? You're not really – you're not supposed to do that. I know in the age of content being needed all the time and influencers, we do speculate a lot.
But there are some lines we try not to cross and that's kind of one of them. He knows its implications.
Showing 261–280 of 460 · page 14 of 23
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