A hit piece by the Huffington Post on a thread about cancel culture. Focused on Matt Taibbi's words from 23 years ago, for which he apologized several times. This is part of the problem, and I hope you can realize that. Every single person that has been in the public light for over 20 years will have some ugly events in their past, get over it.
That isn't true. Most public figures never have something like this in their past. Nor would you have ever forgiven an MSM publication for shouting that Russia would never invade on their front page for months. The NY Times is still living down Judith Miller after 20 years and she's been cancelled from journalism for what Taibbi has done.
Let's go with the false equivalence first. The MSM has not only been wrong about many things in the past, they have actively supported egregious crimes from the US administration. It's not only Judith Miller, they were all completely and utterly wrong about Iraq's WMDs, with disastrous consequences. Since you brought up Russia, the NYT and friends have consistently lied about the "Russiagate" events, including key elements of this narrative. Taibbi was one of the very few journalists with the courage to expose this for what it is. In the present war, yes, he was wrong that Russia would not go to war - an opinion shared by a majority of people at that time, by the way - and admitted so less than a week after the war started. These "mistakes" are not even remotely comparable.
As for your first statement, you will find that yes, every public figure has some dirt on them, if only because the definition of dirt keeps changing. For example, the comments made by Taibbi when he lived in Russia ~23 years ago~ are reflective of what the culture at the time found acceptable to say. Cancel culture is so obnoxious because it is used for hit jobs exactly like the one you are presenting here: find one or two events from someone's past and use that to close your ears to whatever they have to say at present, no matter how valid. Throw in some demands for them to be fired as well, because why not. Oh, and you have no way to atone for your supposed sins; even if you apologize you are tainted forever. It's time we fight back against this idiocy.
"The MSM" isn't really a single entity, but it's thousand and thousands of journalists. How many get cancelled for mistakes or behavior? Like 0.01%? And how often does a major outlet really report misinformation? Very rarely. Media attacking media gets big headlines, but in raw numbers it's really an insignificant number. And things like "Russiagate" are made up by detractors. No respectable journalists reported anything untrue. The facts of the Russian involvement in the 2016 and Trump's relationship to it were never embellished. The fact that there isn't a criminal case represents the gap in admissible evidence and prosecutorial will. The facts are well established. Taibbi's life's work would fill one weekday edition of the NY Times and yet he blew the biggest story of his lifetime. And his behavior 23 years ago was not ever acceptable. And that doesn't mean he is banished from living a life or personal freedom, but I would not trust a single word he writes.
You could choose to look at it critically and decide for yourself what you believe in. It is a factual, point-by-point destruction of your claim above. Zero percent of it hinges on how perfect Taibbi as a person is, or was 20 years ago. Your ideological purity, or whatever it is you think you are standing for here, serves only to close your mind.
Wow, that has aged poorly. All of the stories he insists should be walked back have been confirmed. Manafort and Flynn were both pardoned by Trump despite definitely having communication with Russian agents and lying about it. Roger Stone was also convicted for his role in coordinating the DNC email release with GRU via WikiLeaks. Russian agents visited Trump Tower to sell the campaign emails. Trump lied about his business interests in Russia. And it's absolutely journalistic malpractice to say that Mueller declined to issue indictments when he very specifically said he did not evaluate criminal charges at all because he didn't believe he had the authority. That is just a talking point straight from Bill Barr.
The impeachment trial laid out the details of the Trump campaigns relationships with Russia. No, Trump wasn't taking direct orders from Putin. That was never even suggested. All the MSM stories described back channels, influence, complimentary strategies and that was all true. Trump and the right-wing media upgraded the accusations to a level they knew could never be proven in order to reset expectations to something unattainable. Then obstructed every investigation, waited for convictions on obstruction charges and issued pardons so no one could ever be forced to give up details. Taibbi is framing the story exactly how Trump wants it framed and ignoring the reality. Nothing he references in the MSM reporting was actually incorrect. The hype around what the result of this reporting would result in was never promised by any of the legitimate reporting.
Bonus content, here is Taibbi casting doubt on the Ukrainegate whistleblower based purely on his personal bias about what a whistleblower should look like. Again, he was carrying water for Trump and was 100% incorrect in his agenda-driven reporting:
The only thing that has 'aged poorly' is the #russiagate debacle, which as a result has seriously undermined the credibility of what's left of the legacy media due to their choices to promote endless conspiracy ideas which turned out to be untrue.
This has nothing to do with the endless 'mastercard or visa' team sport that is US politics, which is stitched up by the DNC & RNC and their media so no new parties or politicians can play. We need quality independent journalist more urgently than ever as a result...
Neither you nor Taibbi have actually called out any mistakes the mainstream media has made. They reported accurately. The story resulted in impeachment. Taibbi attacked a straw man. We don't need independent media, we need honest, factual reporting be it independent or otherwise. Taibbi isn't it. He didn't uncover any facts, just sit on the sidelines and cast stones.
It is unquestionable that Russia tried to influence the election. They hacked the DNC and released it via WikiLeaks. They spread disinformation in Trump's favor. And that they invaded Ukraine. Trump at every turn supported Putin and hindered Ukraine. And so did Taibbi for his part. And then he says this story wasn't worth reporting because it didn't result in a criminal conviction?
> Nothing he references in the MSM reporting was actually incorrect.
You clearly have not read my linked article, as most of your points are covered there. Here is a short collection of paragraphs that might interest other readers of this thread who are more inclined to a honest intellectual debate:
"Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump “as a candidate” instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross was suspended.
Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of other individuals’ records. Fortune said C-SPAN was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran the story, and it’s still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own “internal routing error” likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.
CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network’s journalists resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.
In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction."
You seem to be under the impression that Taibbi is some sort of agent working for Trump, because that's what the current zeitgeist is: if someone disagrees with your opinion, they are evil, and likely working for the enemy too. You already relied on your hit piece to try to prove Taibbi was evil, now you are trying to suggest he is a right-wing agent. This is delusional.
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