Letter to Matt Taibbi

Email sent to Matt Taibbi, who recently posted to Twitter: “Obviously it's hard to get worked up over mistakes about Donald Trump, but the sheer quantity of these false stories isn't just on the press anymore - it's on audiences who are all too are happy to be lied to.”

It’s my version of “Screw you, Matt. A lot of audiences are extremely angry about being lied to, and stopped reading the false stories at the garbage mainstream media a long time ago.”

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Just saw your tweet about audience culpability for press failures about Trump - as in, if Trump says it, we-the-media must run in the opposite direction, only to discover months or years later that Trump was telling the truth.

I’m not on Twitter, tried it briefly and found the censorship oppressive and arbitrary.

I tried Parler, and got kicked off it in the Big Tech Big Government purge in January.

I’ve put this in your SubStack comment threads a few times (before giving up and letting my subscription lapse) but please give some thought to the idea that the audiences have already left the building.

At peak, CNN and MSNBC get about 3 million viewers from a population of 330 million. So your media criticism focus is only interesting to the tiny fraction of the tiny fraction who consume any mainstream media at all.

The rest of us have been banished to Gab, (I joined in March 2021) which has been tarred with the ick-factor because people can say racist, misogynist, skeptical and other outsider things there.

It’s kind of an amazing place, really, in which users feel, with good reason, that the platform’s managers respect us enough to make our own credibility judgments and not wither away when exposed to things we disagree with, or things the Government doesn’t want us to know, and so forth. And as a result, all the people who were trying to raise alarms over the past couple years are over there. Including now Naomi Wolf, although she hasn’t posted much. 

I’m not articulating well - lockdown definitely damaged my cognitive abilities, and you did very little to investigate or combat the tyrannical government overreach while fringe free speech people worked on those issues diligently.

My point is, don’t blame the audiences of CNN/MSNBC/Fox/WaPo/NYT for those outlets journalistic failures. The only people watching and reading those outlets for quite awhile have been the people producing that garbage, just talking to themselves, while the rest of angry America ignores them as best we can and tries to find information at the last outposts of free speech like Gab.