🔒 The Tech-Right's War on Independent Journalism

 Last week I saw journalist Matt Taibbi launch himself face-first into the most embarrassingly incorrect and state-sycophantic take I’ve ever seen from him, and it inspired me to pick up a book that had been sitting in a pile next to me for a while now. It was on my list to read but this incident made it skip the queue.

 I’ve bought a whole bunch of books recently, mostly to assist in research for my own book, and I thought it might be a cool idea to review some of the good ones. It will hopefully be a novel departure from just another naked rant about Matt Taibbi.

 The book is Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, by Eoin Higgins. I was reminded I had it when Taibbi, one of the book’s main subjects, started going off on Twitter, making not-quite-veiled threats that he’s going to sue Higgins over its subtitle.

He can’t actually sue, of course, because any lawyer he hired would, you know, read the book, where they would quickly locate the meaning of this subtitle—the book’s main thesis—within the first few pages of the introduction: Higgins does not claim that either Taibbi or the book’s second main character, Glenn Greenwald, have taken money from billionaires. It is rather that right-wing billionaires bought the media platforms that these journalists rely on for their survival.

 That isn’t an opinion; It’s a verified fact. But Taibbi isn’t illiterate, just deliberately obtuse. It’s not even the most glaring example of Taibbi’s abdication of integrity this month. The incident that I led with was his recent foray into broadcasting state propaganda—the Trump administration’s obvious and sloppy attempt to cover from scandals like the Epstein thing by grabbing MAGA by both ears and trying to force them to focus entirely on Trump’s personal enemies.

 What happened is Tulsi Gabbard, six months into her job as Director of National Intelligence, suddenly discovered she had some documents showing that the intelligence community were aware since the start of Trump’s first term in 2017 that the Russian government never made any attempt to influence or meddle in the 2016 election, and thus anybody in the government who ever suggested otherwise, up to and including Obama (especially Obama) has committed high treason.

 The drum beat of the administration ever since has been an open call to strap on the blinkers and refocus his base’s attention away from the scandals that are currently obliterating his ratings and onto the MAGA fever dream that they are finally going to imprison or execute every Democrat whose name isn’t John Fetterman.

Matt Taibbi has been enthusiastically and uncritically signal boosting Gabbard’s claims, which is stark raving nuts, because the deceptive wording and sloppy, rushed, urgent state propagandistic nature should be obvious to a grade school reading comprehension student, let alone a famous award winning journalist. If you’re interested in what Matt got horribly wrong about this story, Ben Cohen does a pretty comprehensive explainer here.

 Eoin Higgins’ Owned explains what the hell happened here—how Matt Taibbi, a journalist who earned his popularity skewering Goldman Sachs and sympathizing with Eric Garner, wound up voting for and carrying an Olympic swimming pool worth of water for President Donald Trump, a man who would dig Garner up if it meant he could kill him again. How Glenn Greenwald, who once jointly won the Pulitzer for his reporting on Edward Snowden ended up a Fox News darling, an ally of Chaya Raichek, and a personal friend of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.

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