Matt Taibbi’s Poker Face

Matt Taibbi has one hell of a poker face. Sitting across a table barely two days before he dropped one of the biggest news stories of the year, he seemed unflinching, bizarrely at ease.

“Keep an eye out Friday,” Taibbi teases as he exits the Ritz Carlton’s cavernous emerald-green restaurant. After participating in Toronto’s biannual Munk Debates, held in the glass-encased Roy Thompson Hall, Taibbi is off to San Francisco the next day — but he doesn’t say why.

Standing at over six feet tall and wearing his trademark fedora, Taibbi lumbers out of the hotel’s opulent lobby, leaving National Review with some parting advice: “Check my Substack then.”

Sure enough, two days later, Taibbi released a post explaining to subscribers that he will be one of the main sources disseminating internal Twitter files provided by the company’s new boss Elon Musk. “The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between,” Taibbi wrote. The blog closes with a screenshot pointing readers to Taibbi’s Twitter post outlining the first installment of the “The Twitter Files.”

Taibbi’s series of tweets that Friday night was the opening chapter in an ongoing saga that has since revealed what many on the right long suspected: Twitter executives knowingly lied to the public about blacklisting conservative and anti-lockdown voices; collaborated with federal law-enforcement agencies such as the FBI; and contrived reasons for banning disfavored stories, such as the report on Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the New York Post on the eve of the 2020 presidential election.

As Taibbi’s original tweet went viral — it had nearly 400,000 likes and 150,000 retweets as of Monday afternoon — outlets including the New York Post and the U.S. Sun began to ask who Matt Taibbi is and why he, of all people, got the scoop of a lifetime.

However, it was clear to audience members in Toronto on that frigid Wednesday night why Taibbi was chosen.

“I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter. My stepmother was a reporter. My godparents were reporters. Every adult I knew growing up seemed to be in media,” Taibbi said during his opening remarks for the debate. “I love the news business. It’s in my bones. But I mourn for it. It’s destroyed itself.”

By night’s end, Taibbi and his debate partner, conservative writer Douglas Murray, had handily beat Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg, convincing the audience by the largest margin ever recorded at a Munk Debate that mainstream media should not be trusted.

Taibbi’s timing couldn’t have been better.

After teeing off on the mainstream media on Wednesday, he followed up by dropping a bombshell on Friday with the characteristic flair that has won him the respect and attention of journalists and readers across the political spectrum for decades.

Taibbi attributes his long-standing popularity to his willingness to challenge power, regardless of who holds it and how they’re using it. As he explained to the nearly 3,000 people packed into Roy Thompson Hall on Wednesday night:

My father had a saying: “The story’s the boss.” In the American context, if the facts tell you the Republicans were the primary villains in this disaster, you write that story. If the facts point more at Democrats, you go that way. . . . Our job is to call things as we see them and leave the rest up to you. We don’t do that now. The story is no longer the boss. Instead, we sell narrative, as part of a new business model that’s increasingly indifferent to fact.

The considerable financial pressures facing journalism — plummeting advertising revenue, free online alternatives, ubiquitous social media — has led mainstream outlets to cut corners to keep eyeballs at all costs. Taibbi began noticing a shift in the quality of journalism when Donald Trump emerged on the political scene.

“In the Trump years, we’ve had this movement towards more sources that are uncheckable,” Taibbi told NR. “We have lots of ‘unnamed people familiar’ with the matter. That’s, like, the new phrase and it makes it very difficult to check everybody’s work because there’s no way of retracing everything.”

The AP recently learned this firsthand when one of its reporters cited an unnamed “senior U.S. intelligence official” as the sole source for the claim that a Russian missile had crossed into Polish territory, killing civilians. As news of the possible attack went viral, European nations raced to condemn Russia and ratchet up pressure. Several hours after the initial report was published, it became clear that the missile was a Ukrainian air-defense missile that went astray. (The AP reporter who wrote the story was fired.)

“From the outside, just think about how crazy that situation is. You have a report where, if you get it wrong, you could start a world war and you have an unnamed source,” Taibbi said flabbergasted. “The whole thing hangs on that. Would you bet the entire world on one unnamed source?”

Jim Rutenberg’s famous 2016 New York Times op-ed, “Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” particularly resonated with Taibbi. Released mere months ahead of Election Day, Rutenberg captured a growing unease that had descended upon the establishment journalistic class fearful that Trump’s heinousness justified any critical story regardless of the truth.

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable,” Rutenberg argued.

While most old-school liberals understood the threat Trump posed, Taibbi’s journalistic pursuits during this time were anchored in the conviction that “getting things wrong and forgiving your own mistakes” would have even more disastrous consequences than failing to hold Trump accountable for every instance of misbehavior. The mainstream media “went the other way. They ran all these crazy stories about him [Trump] and when they were proven wrong didn’t even apologize for it. They didn’t admit it. They probably made money but, in the process, they lost the credibility and you can’t get that back now,” he said.

Unlike the beltway pundits who preferred to pontificate from on high, Taibbi went out to Trump rallies to see Americans of all stripes and relay what he observed in a nuanced way. Rather than dismissing all Trumpers as deplorables or idiots, Taibbi observed the Trump spectacle with curiosity. “It’s like a rolling party,” Taibbi joked, made up half of “suburban old ladies who just think the show is funny,” with the remainder composed of “the bleachers of a Texas A&M game.”

Media coverage of the circus, dismissed by many esteemed journalists as nothing but a carnival for racists or white nationalists, exemplified the detachment of elite journalists from much of the country they live in. Although Taibbi doesn’t disagree that Trump drew noxious elements into the fold, he clarified “that’s not even close to the whole story. The story is way weirder and more interesting.” Unfortunately, when the media needed to expand their scope to capture the complexity, journalists “got narrower in the way they described the phenomenon. It’s just gotten worse.”

It’s a lesson Taibbi is keeping front of mind as Trump has revamped his hopes of returning to the White House in 2024. While he originally dismissed Trump’s electoral chances in 2016 after the Access Hollywood tapes were released, Trump’s shocking victory the following month was sobering for Taibbi. Nevertheless, he sees the possibility that mainstream media will again make same mistake of discounting Trump.

One inoculation, Taibbi believes, is to return to the foundations of good journalism: securing multiple sources, quoting opposing perspectives, and rigorous fact-checking, all of which Taibbi fears are all but extinct in our current ecosystem.

“Once upon a time you could read the New York Times and even if you disagree with the tenor of the piece, the facts would be more or less correct. They would at least make an effort to kind of represent all sides of the story. Now they don’t even bother. They’ll accuse somebody of something and not call for comment,” Taibbi said.

Since then, journalists have sorted themselves into ideological bubbles that reflect the opinions and biases of their audiences.

“One of the problems with the current format if you turn on MSNBC or even Fox is it’s the same thing. You’ll see all these people; they’re never disagreeing with each other. So, you have Joy Reid interviewing Adam Schiff and she might as well be doing PR for him. . . . If everybody’s in a bubble, nobody’s learning.”

It wasn’t always this way.

Taibbi said that had the Munk Debates offered him the same motion “six or seven years ago, I probably could have argued the other side.” After all, Taibbi made a name for himself at Rolling Stone, winning over readers through his ruthless, stylistic coverage of the financial crisis and much else.

Taibbi looks back fondly on the old-school-newsroom days as a sacred space — a last refuge in an increasingly unfunny and politically correct world. He longs for the days when newsrooms felt like “the back of a comedy club,” where journalists would gather “cracking jokes, [and] bulls***ing.” “Now it’s totally the opposite. Everybody’s wound tight. They’re afraid to say anything.”

This wasn’t how Taibbi’s story should have ended up. Raised by a family of reporters (to name a few: his father, stepmother, and godparents), Taibbi told NR, “You would never have known mostly the person at the next desk what their politics were or how they voted. It just wouldn’t have come up.”

Disabused of his faith in the mainstream media, Taibbi absconded to Substack in 2021 in search of intellectual freedom. “If you’re a person who has the wrong kind of belief about something or tweets something, you could find your newsroom trying to get you fired. . . . I work alone now but I would have a tough time in a newsroom now.”

The mainstream-media landscape has become so polluted that it leaves even seasoned journalists like Taibbi now dazed and confused.

“I have a really hard time figuring out how to be informed about things.” Taibbi now believes “there are very few dependable outlets anymore that aren’t kind of in the narrative-selling business.”

Strangely enough, despite Taibbi’s cratering faith in legacy institutions, the lifetime progressive sees the conservative world as fresh and exciting these days. He doesn’t agree philosophically with conservatism, but considers it at least intellectually diverse and combative.

“There’s a bunch of people in the conservative universe who I feel have been emboldened once Trump came along to be a bit more open. They’re not ashamed to say he is wrong about this or he is lying about that. But they’re still holding their principles and that’s why I’m saying conservative media is just more interesting,” he said.

The sentiment is a striking one and something which seems to still rattle Taibbi, who says with a grin, “If you had told me ten years ago I’d be sitting with National Review, I just wouldn’t have been able to process that.”