Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and The New York Times joins me on The Megyn Kelly Show to talk about how he got into journalism, why he s making a killing, and what it s like to grow up the son of a TV reporter.
00:04:02.740No, he came from a different generation.
00:04:04.660And actually, I think my father's case is interesting because media has changed a lot in a lot of positive ways.
00:04:14.380But one of the ways that I think is negative is that, you know, back in the 60s and 70s, when he got into the business,
00:04:21.980a person who was a journalist was more likely to be the son or daughter of a plumber or an electrician than, you know, an Ivy League educated person.
00:04:30.600And he belonged to kind of the last, the last wave of that sort of reporter, I would say.
00:04:42.260And I feel like having worked at, I was at ABC for a very short time, but when I first started my career, but most of the time was at Fox and then a little at NBC.
00:04:51.040I mean, Fox, Roger Ailes hired middle class people, people from middle class backgrounds and no one from elite universities.
00:04:59.180I mean, I can't think of, I always say like O'Reilly said he went to Harvard, but he went to the fake Harvard, you know, where like you go to the Kennedy School for one year.
00:05:38.600And obviously my politics aren't the same as Fox's, but, but I think that that approach was successful for a reason.
00:05:47.380You know, it's, you're fundamentally changing your approach when you start bringing in a whole bunch of Ivy League people to cover the news.
00:05:56.020Because what ends up happening is, you know, the old kind of Seymour Hersh class of reporter, they saw it as their job to challenge people who are in power.
00:06:06.320And this new group of people who are now in, in the media, they see themselves as being on the other side of the rope line.
00:06:14.720And, and they view their mission as basically to explain the point of view of people in power to the kind of unwashed masses and, and apologize for them.
00:06:28.400And so you, I think you, you saw the change, like with movies, like Primary Colors.
00:06:34.360I don't even remember that, that film about the Clintons.
00:06:37.440But the premise of that film was, okay, here's, here's the inside look on a presidential campaign, you know, as told to a friendly reporter who heard these stories, you know, over a bar throughout the course of a campaign.
00:06:53.200As, as, as opposed to, you know, like the, the, the, the blazing hit job that it would have been from an outsider, it was kind of, it was a more sympathetic portrait.
00:07:02.920And that's, that's what you get these days.
00:07:04.980So you decide to become a journalist and you moved to Russia?
00:07:11.400There was a, really, I didn't want to be a journalist.
00:07:14.100I wanted to be a comic novelist when I was growing up.
00:07:17.100Um, my favorite writers were all Russians, uh, people like Gogol, uh, Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote, uh, books like The Master and Margarita.
00:07:28.620So I wanted to learn Russian, learn how to read those books in Russian.
00:07:32.080And I moved over there after doing a little bit of study in the Soviet Union.
00:07:36.620And I just, I loved it over there so much that I stayed for like 11 years, basically.
00:07:41.800Um, but I, I didn't have any, I didn't have any skills apart from the family business, which was journalism.
00:07:48.660So I ended up doing that, um, as a job while I was over there.
00:08:28.660I know it's about Cameron Crowe and, and, uh, and it's got some, some people in there who I worked with.
00:08:35.380And, uh, I have seen the other big Rolling Stone movie doing, you know, Where the Buffalo Roam, uh, which has Bruno Kirby as my, my former boss, uh, Jan Wenner.
00:34:54.440I think it's worse on the left, on the quote unquote left than it is on the right.
00:34:59.000Um, yeah, it was amazing for me watching Fox news on, on election night and seeing people disagreeing with Donald Trump and, and criticizing him.
00:35:11.160I mean, there wasn't, there wasn't a ton of it, but there was some of it and you won't see any of that on MSNBC or CNN.
00:35:17.640But look what's happening to Fox right now.
00:35:19.360I mean, are you following what's happening to them?
00:35:27.880People are angry at Fox news right now for calling Arizona early in, in many people's view for, for pronouncing Joe Biden, the president elect.
00:35:37.280And, you know, I think Brett and Martha are at the middle of it.
00:35:54.320And it's so unfortunate because once upon a time, you know, I think if you go back and look at like the, the Walter Cronkite, Jessica Savage type anchor person, nobody would have looked to those people.
00:36:08.380People with the expectation that they'd be endorsers of, of political views.
00:36:13.440They, they, their value was, was that you believe them when they said something.
00:36:18.600Right. And, and that was, that was the entire, um, point of the commercial enterprise that was the news back, back in the day was that you, you trusted the information that came over those.
00:36:32.580And now who trusts anything that comes out over any of these networks, uh, because they've all, that's why I really think the future is it's individual.
00:36:40.260It's people like going to subscribe to Matt Taibbi, right?
00:36:43.220It's, it's people listening to this podcast saying, I trust her.
00:50:18.420Okay, now, before we get back to Matt and the dumbest book ever written, we're going to bring you a feature that we do on the show sometimes called Asked and Answered.
00:50:27.260And this is when we bring in the executive producer of the Megan Kelly show, Steve Krakauer, who's been pouring through the questions to find some goodies.
00:51:03.720Also, Jason Goldstein wants to know if editorial boards should pledge to have a certain number of people from divergent political backgrounds, particularly in the results of this election.
00:51:20.780They'd rather, you know, that they sort of see it as a higher calling to get him out because they they I don't think they're just calling him racist and all those things.
00:51:36.960They're like, yeah, he's got to go because he doesn't make me feel good about myself and getting rid of him would.
00:51:41.780And if it has to cost ratings, so be it.
00:51:44.760Um, I think the question Jason raised about editorial boards is really interesting, and I would I would love to see it.
00:51:53.520Even if you got like a token Republican on some of these boards, I think it would help.
00:51:58.900But I'll bet you they'd fire them soon thereafter.
00:52:01.360You know, they they say they want to hear what, you know, the other side of the country thinks.
00:52:05.660But then as soon as somebody speaks up and tells them they get fired or they pull their editorial or you remember the New York Times fired that editor who let Tom Cotton's editorial run.
00:52:15.700They had to be fired because an editorial on whether we needed a military presence to control the civil unrest this past summer was endangered black New York Times employees.
00:52:40.400Like, what are you doing, school board, to ensure yourselves that you are representative of if not half the student body and their family politics, then at least some significant percentage.
00:52:52.800Even here in New York City, I've had to say to our school so many times, you know, you have Republicans at this school, right?
00:52:57.500Like, you know, after Trump won in 2016, all the letters that went out, like, we understand how difficult this time is.
00:53:16.740I mean, on that subject, isn't it so interesting how quickly the boards came off all the windows, the storefront windows everywhere where they tried to tell us it was both sides.
00:53:23.140They were worried about both sides rioting.
00:53:29.020So I'd love to see more balance at the corporate level, at the academic level, certainly at the university level, where they've got something like 4% conservatives in the incoming classes.
00:53:40.520But I confess, I think it's just a pipe dream.
00:53:43.840I don't think they really have any interest in understanding half of the country.
00:53:54.980I mean, I think that your point about the editorial boards, I mean, you look at the idea.
00:53:59.280I think that there's certainly political biases that are happening within the media, but there's also geographic bias.
00:54:05.480And if you've got a media that is, you know, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, even certainly ABC, CNN, CBS, you know, you could walk within an hour and visit the headquarters of all those places in New York City and hit them all.
00:54:21.960And until you start to look outside of that, you're going to have a lot of similarities in the thinking that goes into the, you know, the executive ranks of these of these organizations.
00:54:30.840Well, and you know, it's been funny during the Trump era is these organizations are like, well, we have Republicans.
00:55:12.680Find someone who makes decisions that at least knows someone who who they like and respect who voted for Donald Trump that like start there.
00:55:23.000I think people should start saying it loud and proud.
00:55:25.440If you like him, don't be embarrassed about it.
00:55:27.560As you saw, 71 million people feel the same.
00:55:31.820It's like Dennis Prager was saying yesterday.
00:55:33.960This half of the country, they're not alone.
00:55:36.500They're not, no matter how many of the people who control the media and Hollywood and academia and big tech and corporate America tell you, you're not alone.
00:56:06.500Part of the problem, of course, is there's no accountability.
00:56:13.080The media has pursued so many storylines that they told us were awful, awful for Donald Trump, gotten gotten them totally wrong and then never even acknowledged how wrong they were, Matt.
00:56:25.780It's like the list of so-called bombshells that weren't and that they never went back to clean up is as long as Santa's scroll at this point, right?
00:56:36.420Yeah, I'm actually I'm actually putting out a little a little movie about that soon.
00:56:43.720I actually went back and made a list of all the bombshells that had to be walked back or retracted.
00:56:49.780I mean, what are a couple of your favorites?
00:56:53.860Just to take a couple of examples, like remember all the stories about George Papadopoulos and how he was he was the beginning of the of the FBI investigation.
00:57:03.740And that was that was where it all started.
00:57:06.900I mean, almost every news organization did these big features about Papadopoulos and his secret contacts with the Russians.
00:57:16.240Well, about a year ago, there there was testimony that was declassified where the FBI, the former deputy head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, said that they knew by August of 2016 that the evidence, quote, didn't particularly indicate that Papadopoulos had had contact with the Russians.
00:57:39.340So, in other words, the entire predicate for the Trump-Russia investigation they knew was bogus within about a month of starting that investigation.
00:57:52.140And nobody went back and reported that.
00:57:54.120I mean, that's that's hundreds of stories that were out there.
00:57:58.080You know, you know, the Carter Page stories, right, where they they were reporting constantly that there was probable cause that he was an agent of a foreign power.
00:58:08.860He was asked about that on television.
00:58:11.320Now it turns out that the that the the court ruled based on a fraudulent FISA application.
00:58:18.900So where were the retractions for that?
00:58:27.400Or like The New York Times is doing with the 1619 project, which is a lie.
00:58:33.120She's won a Pulitzer for writing this thing, but it's replete with lies.
00:58:37.480The very foundation of the piece, which is that America was founded on slavery and to preserve it is a lie.
00:58:43.180You just take out your eraser and you erase those lines from your piece and you don't disclose that you've done that.
00:58:50.960You just have to have reporters watching the reporters all the time to do comparisons between the original piece and the piece every day thereafter online to try to catch them taking out their lies so that it doesn't become a bigger deal.
00:59:08.700You literally have to use the way back machine now to compare and contrast the old version of the story with a new version of the story because they are they're doing this kind of silent editing technique.
00:59:21.240Now, sometimes you'll see at the bottom of the story a note that says, you know, an earlier version of this story said X, Y and Z, but they leave it out a lot, too.
00:59:33.720And they'll fundamentally change what what the story says just by changing a few words and you won't know.
00:59:56.960I mean, there's no question that Nicole Hannah-Jones is 1619 piece was willfully fraudulent.
01:00:00.920They're just the fact that she still got that Pulitzer, even though a group of very esteemed academics professors like Glenn Lowry, who who is also black, but a contrarian, as he calls himself.
01:00:13.760You know, he doesn't buy sort of the blacks are victims and, you know, they need the white people to bend the knee and all the rest of it.
01:00:20.720Well, by the way, he's coming on the show soon.
01:00:42.520And without consequence, you can misreport because the news organizations have figured out that if you're, let's say, a blue leaning organization like The New York Times or The Washington Post,
01:00:52.900and you get something wrong about Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani or whatever it is, who cares?
01:01:07.960So what there's this drift has taken place in the business where we just don't worry about making sure that we're right in the same way that we used to.
01:01:17.900Like it used to be I don't know about you, you know, but I used to every time I did a story, I couldn't sleep the day before it was published because I was so worried that I got something wrong in there because it would stick to you forever if you made a bad mistake.
01:01:34.480I don't think they I don't think the young people in the business feel that way anymore.
01:01:39.920It's not quite the same approach doesn't feel like.
01:02:19.520He's come out and said, coming soon, a restoration of normal relations between the president and the press.
01:02:27.900And then he elaborated saying, and this is a quote, the media's adversarial approach that you've seen during the Trump years to demanding truth from power, calling out lies, criticizing indecency.
01:02:40.520That approach serves us well, no matter who holds high office.
01:02:45.100If Biden says the blue sky is red, the media must call it out.
01:02:49.540Of course, different degrees of deception deserve to be treated differently.
01:02:54.160A slip of the tongue must not be equated with a smear campaign.
01:02:58.020But in all cases, the media stay on the side of truth.
01:03:30.100This started even before Trump was president.
01:03:34.800What I worry about going forward with Biden is that the press is going to collectively decide we're not going to report on stuff that gives the Republicans any ammunition to go after this administration because that will be bad.
01:03:49.200And that would that might risk another Trump or whatever it is.
01:03:52.740And, you know, we're going to see pretty quickly how how critical they will or won't be.
01:03:57.300My guess is they'll be very, very docile.
01:04:17.540It was the most brilliant column ever that you wrote on white fragility.
01:04:23.520This absurd book that has been making the rounds since the summer and making Robin DiAngelo, its author, rich as she peddles not only her book, but classes based on her book,
01:04:36.580along with a message that you can never get over your white supremacy.
01:04:41.020You have to work on it for the rest of your life, which is very convenient for the person who offers the classes on how you must deal with your white supremacy on an ongoing basis.
01:04:51.160You call it the dumbest book ever written.
01:04:53.900And I I love you say it's part of this new sort of anti-racism movement that is a, quote, dingbat racialist cult.
01:05:08.860So the racial consensus that we lived under for most of the last 50 years was based on, I think, you know, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
01:05:19.020And it was based on the idea that people are people and that even if we have differences, even if we belong to different races, we're all people.
01:05:30.520And that our goal is should be to try to get along, you know, and and to, you know, even if imperfectly, even if we're not there yet,
01:05:40.620that should be the goal as a society is for all of us to live together in harmony and and not to worry about our racial differences.
01:05:48.640This new anti-racism movement takes a completely opposite approach where it says, actually, the problem is, is that we are not spending enough time thinking about race.
01:06:01.540We should heighten awareness of our differences and people who are white should ponder their whiteness all the time.
01:06:11.640And we should be constantly thinking about all the invisible ways in which race and racial perception affects our lives, which is exactly the opposite of what the this Kingian approach to racial relations was.
01:06:28.320So I think that this it's it's it's remarkable.
01:06:33.160People like Robin D'Angelo actually have a lot in common, their writings with with people like Richard Spencer.
01:06:40.200They they are hyper focused on white supremacists on on, yeah, on race, on what the different races and how are and how they how they behave.
01:06:52.520And as opposed to just seeing all people as people.
01:06:56.300And I think that's that's the thing that's crazy.
01:06:58.960Yeah. Well, the difference is Spencer believes that there's something inherently deficient about blacks and inherently superior about whites.
01:07:06.540And D'Angelo thinks it's exactly the opposite.
01:07:09.920It's it's no better. It's no less racist.
01:07:48.880Right. I mean, these people who who go to they come out of, you know, certain universities and then they go to big companies and they say, we're going to clean up your your workplace toxicity issue.
01:08:01.340And all you have to do to to to to get there is buy our six thousand dollar an hour, you know, speaking program and have each of your of your employees go through a an endless series of exercises to work on being less white, whatever that means, which is it's it's preposterous on so many levels and insulting.
01:08:27.180And it leads to some pretty crazy places.
01:08:29.480You know, there are lawsuits in in New York City where some of these programs have said things like, you know, white teachers shouldn't be teaching non-white kids.
01:08:43.000You know, like if you if you extrapolate this kind of thinking out all the way, it leads to some really, really lunatic kind of thinking.
01:09:10.000They all love her because I think they're trying to assuage their white guilt and put some some money into the hostage fund just in case they do something that's considered racist or say something that's considered racist.
01:09:24.140I was ready to confess how bad I was because I was striving to be less white, you know, and this woman, not only is she dishonest, Matt, she's she's an anti intellectual.
01:09:34.900You know, you you you wrote a great line, which was she writes like a person who was put in time out as a child for speaking clearly.
01:09:41.620And here's the quote of you you wrote of her book when there is disequilibrium in the habitus, when social cues are unfamiliar and or when they challenge our capital.
01:09:52.200We use strategies to regain our balance.
01:09:55.960Yeah, I think what she means in human language is like, you know, people find ways to deal.
01:10:01.080I think I think that's what she's trying to say.
01:10:03.400But she just used too many words to get there.
01:10:05.960But yeah, no, the irony of this is is incredible.
01:10:09.820Right. Like America is going through this massive national discussion about racism.
01:10:15.140And what's the first thing that happens?
01:10:17.220It's a white, clearly disturbed author, racist to the top of the bestseller list because you have all these sort of suburban and upper class white people who are who are full of white guilt.
01:10:34.800And the way they assuage that guilt is going and buying Robin DiAngelo's book.
01:10:39.220Right. I love it. She she really wants you to walk in every room as a white person and apologize for the racism that you've perpetrated and that's been perpetrated by your race.
01:10:47.940And then if you say anything mildly offensive and God knows what that is in today's day and age, basically anything, anything said by a white person, you're just offensive, just you're walking around offensive.
01:10:56.840She wants you to say, and I quote, would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you?
01:11:03.280Can you imagine if people actually behave like this?
01:11:09.400I mean, this is the shit that you like Jonathan Capehart was saying, but he made him cry.
01:11:13.420It finally acknowledged his lifetime experience of being a victim over and over and over.
01:11:17.500And you've got conservative black people saying you've got to be fucking kidding me.
01:11:22.280It's just the divide. And yet it's working.
01:11:26.160It's working. It's working. She has scared the daylights out of the media.
01:11:31.200Corporate America has taken the knee on this.
01:11:33.760I mean, like they're giving out free copies of this book.
01:11:36.480And also, Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist.
01:11:39.940Yeah. And look, I I actually agree that there are a lot of these companies do have racial issues and they some of them really need to do do some things to fix.
01:11:52.140You know, there aren't enough black executives at some of these companies. Right.
01:11:58.180Or in Hollywood. And there are issues that have to be dealt with here.
01:12:02.860But this this is not the way to get there is to hire these high priced consultants who who probably in their day to day lives never interact with black people.
01:12:14.500And I think that's abundantly clear from these books.
01:12:16.360That's not the way that we're going to get to the promised land, I don't think, is is by buying.
01:12:21.620Well, but it's scary because not only might your corporation make you read this book, but as you point out, it reflects the orthodoxy of academia.
01:12:29.500It's certainly at the college level, but also before then.
01:12:32.420And I just think we're raising we're trying to create racists where they don't exist.
01:12:38.860You know, if you right now, the messaging is basically if you're white, you have a black friend and you're enjoying each other and you're getting along.
01:13:00.620It's so funny because having kids really disabuses you of a lot of notions about race because you see little children playing with each other and they just don't they have no conception of race.
01:13:12.480It's just not important to them at all.
01:13:15.240But as they get older, we're filling their head.
01:13:18.900We're the people who are filling their heads with negative ideas about race.
01:13:22.620And I and that's what I worry about is that there's you know, we're taking away that natural joy that kids have around each other and replacing it with something that's worse.
01:13:35.440I worry about it because it's like I don't I don't want my kids shamed in while they're still in the single digits, mind you, for being white.
01:13:43.640But then when you start to have a conversation about, you know, the other side to that conversation, you know, like you're not bad just because you're white.
01:13:50.740You and your black friends are equal and you should be like then you're on a subject that you just didn't want to discuss with your kid at this age.
01:13:55.980You know, it's like suddenly you're you are you're part of the problem because you're making it an issue when it wasn't otherwise.
01:14:01.780You see your kids come up, they they'll describe they'll say like she has brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair.
01:14:07.020They don't even know that racist that race is a thing that might be extra sensitive versus eye color.
01:14:13.320But we we make them know the schools make them know.
01:14:17.020And then it places parents in this position to have very nuanced, complex discussions on race that I just don't think these kids need when they're.
01:14:27.580Yeah. And kids and kids are incredibly perceptive and they they pick up on things like people becoming nervous or tensing up when they have to talk about an issue like race, which is the which is not the message I think you would hope that they would send.
01:14:44.720And, you know, I always think about when I was growing up watching Sesame Street, right, which which presented this image of kind of racial harmony and equality that I thought was really beautiful and positive.
01:14:57.180And but without, you know, kind of shoving it in your face, you know, and I think that's that's the kind of thing that's not we're not seeing so much anymore.
01:15:09.580Like we're we're trying to get the kids to think about things that maybe they don't need to when they're that young.
01:15:16.500Well, that's just your racism talking. But thank you for trying to weigh in.
01:15:38.360I had briefly left the company for like eight months.
01:15:41.760So I missed that whole thing, although a lot of my friends were were involved with with that story.
01:15:47.820So, you know, I came back to your thoughts.
01:15:50.740Now, I'm curious your thoughts. So just I'm sure the audience generally remembers this, but Rolling Stone had this big exclusive on UVA University of Virginia.
01:15:58.940A woman came out and said she'd been gang raped at a fraternity party there and everyone ran with it.
01:16:11.140And Rolling Stone had the egg on its face and people started to question, like, why are we doing this?
01:16:16.320Why are we running with any story in which somebody a woman says she's been victimized by a man or a black person says they've been victimized by a white person?
01:16:25.260Hello, Jussie Smollett. Like we keep making the same mistake over and over.
01:16:28.900And do you think it's all tied in like the the need, the need to affirm the alleged victimization of anyone in a protected class?
01:16:40.720And what happened at Rolling Stone was and just just to preface it so that people understand, you know, I worked there for probably a decade before that happened.
01:16:50.580And I had I had actually become exhausted by the fact checking process.
01:16:58.200I was probably spending more time fact checking on my articles about Wall Street than I was writing those pieces.
01:17:06.880The we had a very we were one of the last news organizations in New York that had a pretty sizable fact checking department that went through every single line.
01:17:19.600And so when this happened, I was really shocked because I it was seemed impossible to me that it could have gotten through the department.
01:17:29.640But what it turns out, what happened was the source in the story didn't want to be fact checked in the traditional way, didn't want to have to answer those questions.
01:17:40.340And for a variety of reasons that I think a lot of those editors, you know, regret looking back on on the situation, they kind of turned off the usual fact checking process.
01:17:54.120And I think they thought they were being sensitive to the victim in the case or the ostensible victim.
01:18:01.420But in reality, you're not being sensitive and you're not helping people in that position by not vigorously fact checking them because you end up putting them in an even worse position by publishing something that's not true.
01:18:19.240And they become and they become and for the rest of their lives, it follows them around and it becomes it becomes this thing that that's going to define their lives.
01:18:27.540So I think there's a there's a little problem in the journalism business where, you know, you're in in the in this new culture, we're kind of trained to believe the victim.
01:18:45.980But you can't take away the rigorous fact checking process because that actually doesn't help them.
01:18:51.540In addition to being, you know, terrible, terrible, obviously, for the person who's accused, it doesn't help anybody to turn off that that process.
01:19:00.860No, it's it's it's it's one thing if you do an interview with someone who says they're a victim and you ask tough questions and you probe the story and you present it to the audience as saying, this is this person's allegation.
01:19:16.000And here is what the defendant has said or the person being accused has said, if you if you are open about the fact that you've you've gotten this interview, you're going to tell the audience what the person has to say, that you reach out to the other side to give them a chance to respond.
01:19:30.080That's one thing. But to do an in-depth expose of a story, which is presented very clearly as the story.
01:19:36.880This is what happened is a totally different ballgame.
01:19:41.340And, geez, you have to be so careful, you know, and even now, you know, the news media has a way of reporting these things and telegraphing their belief.
01:19:49.180That's what happened with Jussie Smollett before they know what's happened.
01:19:52.540You know, you look back on the initial reports about him.
01:19:54.820You guys know who he is. He's the guy who made up the fact that he had been attacked by two two guys who with a rope that they attacked.
01:20:03.520They I can't remember the details of how he said he was attacked, but it was a racial attack by two MAGA hat wearing guys.
01:20:10.260And at 2 a.m. in Chicago, in the middle of the the cold storm, you know, the the deep freeze that they went through, it was baloney.
01:20:19.840And the police came out very clearly and said not only did he hurt himself, but he hurt every real victim of racial attacks, of hate crimes, because now people are there less likely to believe them.
01:20:30.080And that's that that's the woman's real crime in the UVA case is it's I don't really care that she has to deal with this following her around for the rest of her life.
01:20:38.060But I do care that now legitimate victims of sexual assault are going to have to overcome her lies in in being believed.
01:20:46.400No, no one deserves a presumption of the truth.
01:21:01.000It's ultimately the people who are going to suffer most from an error like that are the are the people who are who have real stories to tell and who are not going to be believed the next time.
01:21:14.940I mean, another another example of that phenomenon that that was really amazing was the the Caliphate podcast by The New York Times.
01:21:23.800Oh, yeah. Where they this was recent where they had a six part series that was based around a guy who claimed that he you know,
01:21:34.160he joined the ISIS army in Syria and was doing all these crazy things like crucifying people and stabbing them to death.
01:21:43.520And it turned out to be, you know, he was arrested for hoaxing in Canada and The Times just didn't check the story enough,
01:21:51.340you know, which a lot a while ago would have been a significant scandal in the media business.
01:21:57.140But, you know, now it is it's like a two minute story because this happens so often now.
01:22:03.740A couple more questions with you about where you are.
01:22:07.060So you are still writing for Rolling Stone, but you're on Substack now.
01:22:12.820And is it a question of Rolling Stone not not wanting you to express your full opinions like we saw with Andrew Sullivan?
01:22:19.280No, I've always had a lot of freedom at Rolling Stone and they've they I've always had a good relationship with the people there.
01:22:27.700That's really not it so much as I kind of think saw the direction of where the business was heading.
01:22:35.700I was a huge fan of I.F. Stone growing up.
01:22:39.220Um, and I he was a reporter who basically put out a newsletter out of his basement and reached a lot of people.
01:22:48.220And I just thought that this kind of subscriber based journalistic model might be a little liberating in some way.
01:22:55.160And my and also, you know, because Rolling Stone, I obviously I get along with them.
01:23:01.860But they, you know, if you read their content now, it's it was very, very heavily like pro-Biden and pro-Democrat during the last couple of years.
01:23:14.160And, you know, I did feel a little bit of tension there, maybe because I'm more or less apolitical in my approach to the job.
01:23:23.400So I thought this would be a better choice.
01:23:27.980And you've done very well there, right?
01:23:29.680I mean, people use you as an example of the future of media, because what I read in the papers is you tripled your income just by going direct to consumer.
01:23:44.660And I think people like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald will tell you the same thing that that Substack is a model that can work for certain people.
01:23:55.640I think you have to have some profile already before you make that move.
01:24:00.680But and so I don't know that it's going to be a solution for, you know, to support the entire independent media, but it definitely works.
01:24:09.480And and there's a lot there's a huge audience out there of people who are just kind of tired of the old thing.
01:24:15.320So I strongly encourage anyone who's thinking about making this move to not be afraid to do it because it does work.
01:24:23.620Do you worry about big tech cracking down?
01:24:26.000That's there's some musings right now publicly that that's going to be the next place they go, that suddenly you are, quote, accountable because big tech is going to say, I didn't like that article.
01:24:43.400I mean, Substack is a service that is kind of designed to circumvent that because the your primary means of getting the material to your audience is by email.
01:24:53.260So once you have a list of stuff, a list of subscribers, you're just sending them personal notes, basically.
01:25:01.520So even if they even if I were to be taken off, you know, say Twitter or Facebook, I could still reach my audience.
01:25:10.360But I am really worried about that because clearly the things that I write could easily be censored in the same way that a lot of other people are being censored these days.
01:25:25.240That's why that's why I wanted to own Devil May Care Media.
01:25:28.120I didn't I didn't want anybody else's money.
01:25:29.780I didn't want to partner with anybody.
01:25:31.680I use Red Seat Ventures just to sort of get the show on the air because I don't know how to do that.
01:25:35.480But I'm the boss and it's my dough and no one can fire me.
01:25:38.080And right, honestly, like if somebody cancels you out, I'll publish you.
01:25:42.120I just I feel like that's my dream is just like I hate I hate what's happening and screw big tech and screw all these people who are trying to censor legitimate journalists and thought leaders from having a contrarian viewpoint.
01:25:57.000You know, if we don't stand up and fight, then no one will.
01:26:00.580And then the audience is so ill served by this monolithic voice, which, by the way, we just saw that the country split right down the middle.
01:26:07.820Well, you know, it's seventy four million, seventy one million to Biden, Trump.
01:26:12.180It's split right down the middle and there there is not uniformity of viewpoint in the United States.
01:26:19.800Absolutely. And, you know, the media also should be very, very worried about speech restrictions.
01:26:26.580And they're not at all, which really, really freaks me out.
01:26:31.220You know, I I wrote an article before the election talking about how I I didn't particularly feel like voting for either candidate.
01:26:38.200And the original headline I had for that piece was going to be vote for neither.
01:26:43.480But I I didn't do that because I knew that that would have triggered a response from probably Twitter, which has a rule against any kind of material that it might be seen as suppressing the vote.
01:27:01.720So there's all these new rules that you have to worry about when you're when you're doing this stuff now and you never know when they're going to decide to, you know, to take you off their site or to put or to suspend you or to to to block your content or to do what they did to the New York Post and lock your Twitter account.
01:27:24.280You said earlier that you normally never said who you, you know, like what your political leanings were and tried to just keep the vest up on that and that now you don't think that's realistic and your approach is changing.
01:27:45.120Um, but but but the problem is in the modern landscape, they're pushing you to be more and more open about what your political leanings are.
01:27:55.500So there you don't see very many people in the traditional mainstream media who about whose politics you don't have an idea like you pretty much know who everybody's voting for.
01:28:09.980Right. I mean, can you can you think of a major journalistic figure whose vote was a mystery, you know, in the recent cycle?
01:28:19.140There aren't that many. And it used to be not true.
01:28:21.840It used to be considered a virtue to if the audience didn't know anything about your personal life or your or your personal politics.
01:28:30.060The reason you want to you want to stay a little bit of a mystery to your readers is because it may at some point become necessary to criticize, you know, this or that political party.
01:28:42.480And if if you've already publicly declared yourself to be on their side about things, it makes it harder to do that.
01:28:50.060So I always try to stay a little bit coy about that. And if if I have to say something nasty about a politician, well, that's OK, because, you know, I haven't already announced myself as and to the contrary point.
01:29:07.520If you say I'm for Biden and I'm and I'm against Trump or I'm I'm for Trump and I'm against Biden or whatever, if you say something nasty about the other side, it means less.
01:29:20.620Right. Because because you've already declared yourself to be a partisan.
01:29:25.660So I think there's a lot of value in trying to to hide a little bit from from the audience and just just say just make observations and have people judge them on the merits.
01:29:35.660I mean, I find it interesting, of course, because this has been my own history.
01:29:40.200You know, I'll challenge anyone you put in front of me.
01:29:42.580I don't really care whether they have a D or an R next to their name.
01:30:02.120You know, I'm not a registered Republican, nor am I rooting for anybody because they're a Republican.
01:30:05.880I've I've been pretty open about the fact that I have I have center right leanings, but I have some things on the center left that I'm more aligned with as well.
01:30:13.960And and that is as much as I'll say, because that's what's true for me.
01:30:18.140Being fair is easy because it's just my natural ideology.
01:30:21.380Like I'm open minded and I want to be convinced either way.
01:30:26.020You know, I know, for example, Lester Holt is a Republican, but I have no problem with seeing him anchor a debate involving a Republican because I think he's fair.
01:30:34.840Um, but I know, of course, that like Don Lemon is it is it is just a, you know, diehard progressive.
01:30:44.940He's a leftist and I would never want to see him anchor a presidential debate because there's zero chance he would be fair to the Republican.
01:30:55.600I mean, I obviously have anchored five presidential debates.
01:30:58.560They're all Republican primaries, but I've, of course, got no problem throwing punches at Republicans.
01:31:04.780I just wonder what the future of the of the industry looks like now that I because I think I agree with you more and more people are having to declare where they stand.
01:31:13.460And does it disqualify more and more journalists from staying in the fray?
01:31:18.440I hope not, because I think with more of us having columns, having podcasts like I have here, you have to have that authentic connection with your audience and you have to be honest about how you see the news.
01:31:28.500That's why they're coming to you for news commentary more and more.
01:31:31.040And I don't think it should disqualify you from journalism, from hard hitting journalism.
01:31:37.660And the last thing I'll say about that is the press derives all of its institutional power from the perception that it's separate from politicians.
01:31:49.980And every time it announces itself as being in the fold with a political party, it loses power.
01:31:59.360So I don't know why people do that voluntarily.
01:32:04.020You know, you should you should you should try to retain as much influence as you can.
01:32:08.380And in order to do that, you have to be you have to be above the frame, like fair and willing to go after both both groups.
01:34:15.380The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.
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