Vyacheslav Zilber: VZ Matt Taibbi: MT

Nationalism. Worthy and Unworthy Victims. Whataboutism

VZ: But I am also wondering, you talked about all these new click-bait media, BuzzFeed, as opposed to legacy media. But in the end, what you discussed in your interview with Prof. Chomsky, like the coverage of atrocities committed by United States or its allies and atrocities committed by US enemies, like Indonesia and Cambodia or Yemen and Syria. I had the impression that has more or less remained similar, that this nationalism, this cheering for one’s own team or at least accepting the government’s framework when reporting. That it still remains similar as before and now.

MT: That part of it is still very true. A lot of what Chomsky, Prof. Chomsky and Herman, were writing about was this overriding propaganda framework where if we do it, it’s not bad, if somebody else does it, it is bad. And we still have that instinct across the media today even though the business has changed a lot and the audience is broken up into parts so you have FOX going after their audience and MSNBC going after its audience, but all of these outlets still basically hold the same ideas. Right. So you really won’t see anybody focusing on Yemen as much as they do Syria. There was a pretty vivid demonstration in the Russiagate phenomenon. You know a few people, a few brave people started to point out that we have manipulated Russian elections in 1996 and there was a very violent reaction to that. Then really, it is not like - people call it whataboutism, but it is really just providing context for your audience. We want people to understand that this is something that goes on everywhere, that we do it and other countries do it also. It is still not allowed to really do that and does not matter where, what outlet you work for.

VZ: I had the impression that it is also the case with North Korea and Iran and across the board.

Flak

VZ: Have you seen Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on the Real Time with Bill Maher? He speaks out in favour of talking to the Russian government because both states have nuclear weapons and it’s important. And the panel is really outrage[d] when he suggests that Russia and America both meddle.

MT: I did not see that. I can imagine. I have been on that show. It’s a very tough dynamic to be the person that everybody else is criticizing. That’s a pretty vivid demonstration of how flak works in the Chomsky model. You just do not want to be the person that everybody else is yelling at. No matter how brave you are eventually you unconsciously start avoiding taking those positions. And it is very rare – you know I think you see with somebody like Glenn Greenwald who makes a point of continuing to do that. But most people will start retreating from doing that after a couple of those experiences.

The Audience. Responsibility

VZ: You mentioned different networks appealing to different audiences. I am interested in your audience, not just for this work, but in general. I kept seeing several themes going through your writings. And you don’t cover just the people in power, just the White House, the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill or just what Amy Goodman often does, going out to cover popular movements, Occupy Wall Street, and risking getting arrested. You talk about the divide, about economics, but also about how it affects people who are not in power. How would you describe it? Who is your audience? Who do you like to work with?

MT: That is a very good question. I am kind of struggling with it right now because it used to be you really did not have to think about it. I just kind of did whatever stories I thought were interesting and whatever audience was interested came. Now, audiences are much more sensitive and I think because of the internet, because of their viewing habits, people expect not to be challenged when they click on[to] an article or open a book. They don’t like to be accused of being part of a system that is corrupt and that has always been something that I have tried to actually consciously do in my work. Whenever I cover anything, I try to ask: What is my complicity in it? Did I contribute anything to this? Did my friends contribute anything to this? [Did t]he people I vote for contribute to this? I think these are important questions to ask. And so I think if I had to define my audience I think it is very varied because mostly what I do is I take a story that is very complicated and I try to use story-telling and writing skills to get people interested in difficult topics like finance or how military contracting works or something like that. And pretty much everybody should be interested in this stuff. But the problem that I am having now is: If you don’t very, very carefully present your material, you will very quickly lose audiences. Again, in the post-Trump era, most liberal audiences, all they want to hear is “Trump is bad”, “Trump this, Trump that.” And I think that’s a huge distraction, I just think that’s a kind of a cop out and that we should be focusing on lots of things. He is the symptom and not the cure, but people don’t want to hear that. And I think what I am finding out is that you lose audience pretty quickly if you don’t give people what they want. But you have to do that.

Perspective

VZ: I have the impression that your perspective is different from most, definitively from the mainstream and it is probably your experience as you said. I remember reading that according to Livy the expansion of Rome was because Rome was helping allies and according to Polybius who was from Greece and came to Rome as a captive it was an expression of imperial will, because Rome wanted to conquer these places.

MT: Yes. Obviously, I think working overseas for so long – I think it is an experience every reporter should have. We should learn to look at America the way the rest of the world looks at us. I had the experience of living in Russia, I also lived in Uzbekistan where I was around Muslim cultures and I lived in Mongolia for a while. So you learn to see how America looks to the rest of the world. I think it is a very important perspective because, obviously, because other cultures look at us in a very different light and – you know - they view us as basically a gigantic, brainless superpower that overuses its economic and military might. Right. And we just are not trained to think like that as journalists in America. We are trained to be very focused on the palace intrigue in the White House, all the rituals of the elections, but we are not trained to look at the whole framework of what is America, what kind of, how does it use its muscle overseas, how does it manipulate its population. These are things that we are not really taught, but you can only really get from having a different experience. I think it is one of the reasons why you see a lot of foreign-born people coming to America and having a lot of success in the society because they grew up without the illusions.

What Reaction Do You Expect?

VZ: And what do you expect when you expose these delusions, expose this mechanism, how it works in your new book?

[Prof.] Noam Chomsky’s and Prof. Edward Herman’s “propaganda model” was often dismissed as a conspiracy theory. And as you talked about it with Prof. Chomsky, you know that the part on East Timor was often ignored and the part on Cambodia was used to accuse them of supporting Pol Pot. And today many people are accused of supporting Assad. What do you think will happen with your new work?

MT: I am used to that. The standard way of dealing an unpleasant journalist these days – you know you start with calling him or her a racist, a misogynist, plus pro-Russian, pro-Assad. The labels just change over the years, but it is always, you have a link to the enemy somehow. So during the Iraq years, if you criticized the war effort, people said “you are an al-Qaeda lover” or “you are a terrorist lover.” And now the labels just change.

I mean if you look back at what Chomsky wrote, for instance, right. And people - it was amazing to me to watch the reaction just to the interview that I did with him, you know people talking about him being a Pol Pot apologist. When I read Chomsky talking about Cambodia, it is pretty explicit that Pol Pot was a monster. His only criticism is we were just as bad. Or the eras when atrocities were going on with our help were just as destructive. And that is very different than being an apologist, but in the American mindset that’s what being an apologist is. If you just tell the truth about something, people can’t handle it and they have to understand it as advocacy for some evil foreign power or else they just can’t grasp it. And you see that a lot right now with the Russia phenomenon you know. There are millions of people who literally think that Glenn Greenwald is an agent of the Russian state because it has been repeated so often and that’s just how it works these days.

Fake News and Censorship

VZ: And this sentiment is also ideal for the national security establishment to push through such measures as is happening with Facebook and the Atlantic Council because they are now protecting the people from fake news and from Russia.

MT: That’s an amazing story to me, the speed with which people accepted that whole idea like “Fake news is bad, therefore we need this star chamber protecting us from fake news.” What are you talking about! If you go back to 2016, what fake news are people actually talking about! I mean the most damaging news was real news. It was the release of the Podesta letters, that sort of stuff. The actual amount of fake news was very, very small, it’s infinitesimal. And the overwhelming impact was felt in legal marketing techniques that, for instance, the Trump campaign worked with Facebook to use, to target voters, to send them news stories that they liked. All of that stuff is totally legal and allowable and didn’t involve fake news for the most part.

I think what people are reacting to [you know] are situations like Alex Jones and, yes, that’s very, very bad journalism and I would hope that somebody like that wouldn’t last long in the business. But the damage is not so bad that I would welcome in government censorship. I think people underestimate how serious a step that is. Obviously, you growing up in Russia have some understanding of the gravity of that. And Americans just do not, they do not grasp how serious that step is.

VZ: And you point out in your article that there is a different, the standard, well established way to deal with figures like Mr. Jones which does not involve Facebook and the Atlantic Council.

MT: You know we had a system that worked perfectly well for a really long time. I mean there is a reason why reporters like me whenever we do a story - I think if you talk to any journalist they will tell you that the night before a story comes out you don’t sleep very well because you are terrified that you are going to wake up in the morning and find out that you made some horrible mistake that could end your carrier. And that fear that you live with, that comes from litigation. You are afraid that you are going to make a mistake that is going to cost your company millions of dollars, that is going to get you fired. We have seen very graphic examples of this, I mean at my own company, at Rolling Stone. We had an example of that. It cost multiple people their jobs. And that’s the way we dealt with it, for years and years and years. If you tell a lie about somebody, and specifically the kind of lie that Jones traffics in. The one – you know we call it defamation per se which is telling a lie that could be damaging to somebody’s carrier or reputation: accusing them of a crime, accusing them of sexual misconduct. If you screw one of those things up, it was a given for half a century that you are not going to work again for a long time. And it was a good system. And I think the fact that Alex Jones slipped through the cracks for a little while – people hated him so much that they were willing to take this unbelievably extreme step of allowing a handful of corporate overlords to have this power over the press. Again, they just don’t, they don’t understand the difference. That court system was there to protect people like me back in the day and now I don’t have that protection. Somebody could decide tomorrow that what I did was bad and I would not be – I would be de-platformed. And that’s very dangerous.

VZ: Yes, it has happened to some independent, left and progressive journalists and in other cases that the views are capped or the number of subscribers has been reduced by these platforms.

Respecting Authority

VZ: I have a specific question about the situation you just described. There was this famous article about the Nayirah testimony, about this girl who testified about atrocities committed by the Iraqi military, babies taken out of incubators, before the Gulf War, before United States intervened in Iraq. And there was this famous reporter (John R. MacArthur) who received an award [who] revealed that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. And I was very disappointed because in the end the reporter instead of saying that the senators who were leading that session, that they knew and they mislead the public, the reporter said it remains a question whether they knew or not. Do you think the reporter did not just say “they lied” because he was afraid of the consequences?

The reporter who wrote the exposé, who revealed that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and that it was planned with the help of a public relations firm. He did not conclude by saying that it was a big lie, that the senators misled the public. He formulated it as a question. He said now the question is whether the senators knew about all of this.

MT: That they knew it was false.

VZ: I thought the common sense conclusion was “Of course they knew and they lied.” But why so careful? Why so deferential? What do you think? Why not just say “They lied!” Why be so deferential to the people in power? Is it because of the legal threat?

MT: Well, I mean you just see a lot. That incident was a long time ago, that was I think early 90th. I think what you just see a lot of is – and this came out in the Judith Miller episode too – is when reporters get an explanation for something from very powerful people, especially in the White House or in the security services, you know less so in Congress maybe, they tend to give people the benefit of the doubt far too often. I have talked about this before. We are trained in this country to have an almost religious worship of credentials. So if a senator tells you something, you are trained to believe it a lot faster than you would believe somebody standing on the street even though the standard should be the same. And I think. I can’t speak to that particular incident because that was so long ago, but what I will say is we are seeing a lot of that kind of behavior right now where – just to give you an example: this famous anonymous op-ed that just came out in the New York Times. There were a lot of controversial things about that. One of the lines that struck me the most was this idea: Okay, here is this anonymous person telling us that he or she had discussions about invoking the 25th amendment with other people in the White House. And if you are the New York Times, how do you confirm that? There is no way. You can’t call up those people for confirmation. You have got a secret source telling you something in secret and he is telling you a story that you cannot verify. But you put it out anyway. And the reason people do that is because this person has a title. This person is probably a high-ranking White House official, therefore we have to assume the person is telling the truth. And if you look at the reporting in the past couple of years about virtually any national security issue, they are all infected with unnamed sources telling us things and we never push back, we never say “Where did you get that?”, “How do you prove that?” We are just way too deferential to people in power. And I don’t know where it comes from because that was not always true. The typical news reporter fifty years ago was a little bit more like Sy Hersh, right, like a jerk you know what I mean, like somebody who if you told that the sky was blue he was going to check it out. And that is just not the case anymore, unfortunately I think. We just don’t push back as much as we should. I am sorry if that does not answer your question.

VZ: No, it does, it does very much! It is more convincing than a legal issue. It is more pervasive and more dangerous than the threat of a lawsuit, particularly because it comes from inside, it is self-imposed.

MT: Definitively.



