Slava Zilber: SZ

Matt Taibbi: MT

SZ: I am talking to Matt Taibbi, a reporter for the Rolling Stone magazine and author of several books, among them “Griftopia”, “The Great Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”, “Insane Clown President”, “I Can’t Breath: A Killing on Bay Street”, “The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing” and the latest book “The Fairway or Thirty Years after Manufacturing Consent, How Mass Media Still Keeps Thought Inbounds.”

The Fairway. Thirty Years after Manufacturing Consent, How Mass Media Still Keeps Thought Inbounds

SZ: Matt, could please explain the title, and also talk about the importance of Prof. Herman’s and Prof. Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent,” how has it affected you and your work, and what motivated you to take on this project. You talk about a need for an update and about changes you observed in the media landscape.

MT: The title. I don’t know if it is going to end up being a title. I don’t know if you are a golfer, but the idea is in golf that you want to stay on the fairway. Right. When you hit off the tee, the object is to stay on the trim part of the course and a good golfer will stand within bounds and not end up in the rough. And the metaphor here is that’s what we do in the media. We sort of keep our debate artificially between two poles of thought which are pretty roughly described as the left and the right side in America. Most media consumers in this country aren’t really conscious of this idea that there is a whole other world of thoughts and ideas outside of what they see on television. But what I am trying to stress in the book is that sort of original “Manufacturing Consent” idea which is that the debate has been artificially narrowed, and we are actually stuck on this artificial little strip where the debate happens. And as to the project - again, I grew up in the media, it has been my whole life watching the changes in the business and that book had a profound effect on me as a young person, “Manufacturing Consent,” but I think there have been a lot of changes in the business in the last thirty years or so and I started thinking about ten years ago: “Would not it be cool if somebody did a full review of Chomsky’s theory and looked back at it now, especially with the internet.” And that’s what I am trying to do with this book.

Internet Censorship

SZ: You talk about these changes. You mention the conservative talk radio, the 24-hour news cycle and the internet. Could you discuss this and particularly [the] internet? You have written several articles: “Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship” and “Censorship Does Not End Well.” And recently, an article by Alan MacLeod in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out that after the Atlantic Council Facebook is now cooperating with the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, branches of the National Endowment for Democracy, basically an arm of the CIA.

MT: Right. Yes, I know. These are incredible stories and it is kind of amazing to me watching sort of non-response of my colleagues to these developments. There was a time when this kind of a thing where the idea that we might have some kind of government star chamber censoring the media, like every reporter in the world would have been up in arms about it, I feel like thirty years ago or forty years ago. I mean I grew up, my first job was at the Village Voice in the late eighties, I was right around the corner from Nat Hentoff who was the big civil liberties expert in America. Reporters would have gone nuts back in the eighties or early nineties if you had told them that the National Democratic Institute, or something like the Atlantic Council which is basically a NATO organization, or the National Endowment for Democracy, or – I am sorry “The New Democratic Alliance” I can’t remember which one.

SZ: Yes, International Republican Institute which are all branches of the [National] Endowment for Democracy.

MT: Exactly, Endowment for Democracy. I know people who worked overseas and did propaganda work for the United States, like the US Information Agency which you will find in every embassy. And those institutes are what we used - they were consultants when we helped foreign governments guide what their messaging was going to be. They are de facto arms of the government, essentially. They may be technically independent, but the idea of them partnering with Facebook and Google and other platforms to help filter content is just mind-blowing. And what is really weird about it, again, it’s the total indifference of the press to this development.

Censorship in America

SZ: And you wrote in the obituary of Edward Herman about this difference between the censorship, for example, in the Soviet Union and in Russia – and you address it also in this new work – and between the more subtle, often unconscious censorship which Prof. Herman and Prof. Chomsky describe. But this is basically the Soviet, the Russian form of censorship where these officials, basically the state officials can just delete an account like Venezuelanalysis they don’t like.

MT: It’s a completely, it’s really actually unfortunate I think that Americans, a lot of Americans grew up thinking about the Cold War and thinking about censorship as something that happens that way. Right. You know because we had the experience of meeting people like Solzhenitsyn or Sergei Dovlatov - you know – who was a reporter before he was a fiction writer. They came over and told us all these horror stories about what happens in the Soviet Union. You know – we know that even the greatest novels like Master and Margarita were suppressed – you know – for decades. And that’s our idea of what censorship is. Whereas the much more complicated reality in western countries and particularly in America is that we have this very elaborate policing system that goes on within the big media companies, that weeds out, carefully weeds out people who have the wrong opinions or who are too independent-minded and we just do not promote those people to positions of influence and that’s how censorship works in America. We don’t come in and just x out a news report, you just won’t have this report because there is nobody there to do it.

The Bubble. The Relationship between Reporters and Politicians

SZ: I found it very interesting. You talk about these mechanisms and you addressed, for example on Seth Meyers’ show, this relationship between the reporters and politicians they cover that is like a bubble and the Stockholm syndrome sets in.

Have you personally experienced it and how have you managed to stay immune? And do you see this continuity from the days of the original “Manufacturing Consent” [1988] to today, this sharing of assumptions between those groups and this symbiosis?

MT: I think I was fortunate because I started my career overseas, the first really ten years that I worked in the media. Well, I started publishing on my own when I was probably 25. I started editing my own newspaper, I had to put my own money into printing, I had to do distribution by myself. So I was basically, I came from a place, despite the fact that I grew up around my father who worked in network television, I ended up mostly coming out of the alternative journalism world where we were very much independent and I was kind of spared that indoctrination process that you get in the press. So when I did finally return to America. I can tell one story that is very illustrative of what we are talking about.

When I was sent out to cover Barack Obama in 2008 – I liked Obama, I think all the reporters did, we all thought he was cool -, but when I first went on the plane, I went back into the press section and I saw that all over the press section the reporters had pasted pictures of themselves posing with Barack Obama. I was like a high school yearbook room, you know. This was like a ritual that everyone has done where, you know: “Oh, we have all taken our own cool pictures with the cool candidate.” And again, back in the seventies, you would never have seen reporters, you know, doing that kind of thing. It was considered unseemly to be seen even shaking hands with a politician and there was a big culture shift in the business where suddenly the idea is we are on the other side of the rope line now, you know, we are part of the system, we don’t mind being pals with the president or the candidate. I was really shocked by that. It took me a while to get over that. And I had arguments with people on the plane about that. But for me that’s the perfect illustration of how this generation of reporters doesn’t see itself as separate in the same way that people in Seymour Hersh’s day would have, for instance.

Change. Journalists Then and Now

SZ: There was a study in FAIR on the background of journalists and apart, I believe, from lawyers there was the highest number of people with Ivy League degrees among journalists today. And they pointed to this problem that, for example, Judith Miller saw herself as an equal of the people she was covering.

MT: That’s a really important point because the history of the business is completely different. If you go back to the early 1800s, the first reporters were really more like blacksmiths. That was the class that they came from. Their expertise was that they knew how fix, and build, and maintain a printing press. So you started as a kid when you were thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, and you worked the press and then maybe when you got old enough you wrote for your paper and you distributed it in the town. And so there was a tradition that goes all the way to that of reporters coming from the working classes. They were really more like plumbers or electricians, a reporter who typically came from that group of people. And you can see it again with somebody like Seymour Hersh who did go to college, but the typical profile was somebody who started out when they were sixteen or seventeen and they were copy boys or whatever it was. And it was more of a trade than a profession. But then, after “All the President’s Men” and Watergate, it became like a sexy thing for upper class kids to do. And that’s when you had that Ivy League situation coming into play, when you have all these people now. That’s a big culture change in the business.