Beyond Russiagate

with Matt Taibbi and John McWhorter

Say what you want about Donald J. Trump. Say he was incompetent, unfit for office, a grifter, what have you. Whatever the case, he won the 2016 election fair and square. But among many in the mainstream media, it seemed that Trump’s win could only be explained as the result of election interference from a former power (rather than, say, a critical mass of voters who felt alienated from both the mainstream Republican and Democratic Parties). Thus emerged the idea that the Trump campaign secretly colluded with Vladimir Putin to swing the election in Trump’s favor, and thus followed years of fruitless attempts to find evidence to support this theory.

In the following excerpt from my recent conversation with John McWhorter and journalist Matt Taibbi, we begin by entertaining the idea that the Russiagate non-scandal may have so distorted Americans’ sense of Putin’s capabilities and motivations that his decision to invade Ukraine came as surprise to many otherwise well-informed journalists and experts. As a critic of Russiagate, Matt sees it as part not only of an inability to grapple with Trump’s electoral victory, but also as part of the way journalism has transformed over the last two decades. We get into how those changes affect the way we understand the world around, and why the people who get the story wrong—on Russiagate, on Iraq—so often manage to keep their jobs.

Matt is just as incisive a media critic as he is a journalist, and it was great having him on the show. Let me know what you think!

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GLENN LOURY: But I want you to address my Russiagate observation. John says Trump was an idiot. Let me stipulate that. Trump's an idiot. But the anti-Trump, Russiagate-motivated takedown attempts were built on sand. They were false. It was a moral panic. And I'm wondering whether or not it impeded our capacity to see what has now developed into a Russian attack in Ukraine, and whether or not possibilities of mitigating that by seeing Russia as a power that needed to be dealt with in a subtle way were missed through the fog of Russiagate: stealing our election, Trump is a Putin puppet, et cetera. Please take that up, Matt.

MATT TAIBBI: Sure. Yeah. I've obviously been pretty outspoken about this. I looked at it mostly from the media angle. I think Russiagate was an embarrassing episode in the history of American media, mainly because of our propensity for reporting unsourced [stories] or stories that were sourced to anonymous intelligence sources where we can't see the proof of things.

So for instance, somebody might be told, well, the intelligence agents think that Carter Page is an agent of a foreign power or the FISA court is reporting that this Trump aide has had secret meetings with Russian intelligence officials, but we can't tell you how we know that or why we know that. As reporters, we're not supposed to just dump that out there on the front page. We're supposed to confirm that somehow. And there were years of stories where we didn't do that, because I think there was a belief among some reporters that the story was true, and then there were other people who just were incautious.

I think you make a good observation that this cartoonized version of what Russia was and what they were capable of may have obscured our ability to analyze what was actually going on in the country. Certainly in 2012, when Barack Obama was running against Romney, and I think the quote was he called Russia a gnat on the butt of an elephant. I think that was probably closer to the reality of what Russia was, where we depicted them as this all-powerful, sort of Iagoesque international figure that could reach into the American electoral system and change results.

I don't think that was true at all. I think it's a nation that's got a lot of economic troubles. The one thing that it has is a strong military. It's deeply paranoid about the West, and it doesn't have a grand plan for conquering us. I think its plans are much more defensive. So on that front, they're deeply afraid of the West, which might have, I think, stimulated this invasion of Ukraine, if that makes sense. But I'm with you on Russiagate, obviously. I've got tens of thousands of words written about that episode.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Matt, did you use the word “Iagoesque”? I'm gonna keep that. I like that.

You gotta know your Shakespeare. But we do, we know our Shakespeare. [laugh]

MAT: Well, of course, of course.

You apologized for getting it wrong. Where's the apology from the “mainstream media” for all the shit that they've gotten wrong over the last decade?

MATT: Yeah, well, nonexistent. And if you go back even further to the WMD episode, not only did nobody apologize for getting that wrong, everybody got promoted. [laugh] All the people who were the most wrong in that episode, they're all the editors of magazines now, some pretty influential ones if you know what I'm talking about.

I think the media, when they don't apologize for making mistakes, they just make a tactical error. Audiences' trust is the most important thing in media. If you don't have it, you're dead. You will lose audience share if people don't believe that you're being straight with them. If they don't believe that you have self-awareness, they won't listen to you anymore. And we've seen the national news media in this country has had tremendous problems keeping its audience, particularly with Trump out of the picture. And I think when you get stuff wrong, you gotta cop to it, or else people will stop believing what you have to say is true. And we just don't do that.

Worse than that, we have a new habit of making silent edits. So if there's a mistake, rather than announcing it in a big correction, you might just change it in the next version of the online article. Take out certain parts, not put a notation at the bottom of the page. That stuff's also kind of Orwellian, when you think about it. Making changes and not telling people that there used to be another news story here that said something different? That's pretty creepy. And we're starting to do that more and more often.

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JOHN: A tiny bit of pushback on that, though ...

MATT: Sure.

Says the New York Times columnist.

JOHN: ... if you're trying to get a sense of where people's heads and hearts are, is that I think we tend, especially people who, I don't wanna necessarily say “intellectual,” but people who have a story to tell, who are looking at things with a kind of broad perspective. You see trends, you get the feeling that things are moving in a certain direction, and your sense has to be—if you're any kind of scientist—your sense has to be that there're gonna be some hairs out of place. There's gonna be an eyelash behind the contact lens, things go like this, they don't go like this.

That's just the nature of things. And so you see something that's an exception. You see something that's wrong. And in your mind, you figure, okay, not perfect, but still the general story is this. I think you can therefore justify quite a bit—it can even go over 50%—quite a bit that doesn't fit your narrative. And I don't think that it's necessarily wrong to think in terms of narratives in itself. I think, frankly, to an extent it's a kind of intelligence. If all you're gonna do is collect butterflies—and Matt I'm not accusing you of this at all—but if all you're gonna do is collect butterflies, you're not an entomologist.

And so for example, we are talking around a few people in terms of these people who get promoted, et cetera, despite being wrong. I happened to have a conversation with one of those people not long ago, for reasons that need not detain us. And that person was talking about, you know, what's going on and Ukraine, et cetera. And I can say that person has a story. That person is perfectly aware of what has gone wrong, where things have not followed the narrative of people like him. But I can't say that I found myself listening to a self-inflated blowhard who doesn't understand how the world works. It's that he sees a trend. I'm just gonna leave it there. And Matt, I completely take your point.

John, excuse me for interrupting. You're being too subtle for me. Maybe you and Matt are following. And I'm not asking you to name a name, I'm just asking you to add a little bit more detail to what it is that you're trying to get across.

JOHN: Well, these neocons, right Matt? I mean the people who, twenty years ago, had a certain story they were promoting about why Iraq made sense and America's place in the world. I know a lot of those people. And I continue to know a lot of those people in various ways. And I can say that I completely understand Matt's critique. I don't agree with those people anymore on these world issues. But I can always see how they can sleep at night. And it's because a person has a narrative. One has to have a narrative to engage the world intelligently to an extent, I think.

So I'm with you now. David Frum. I'm with you now. Bill Kristol. I'm with you now. John Podhoretz. “John Podhoretz Sucks” is the title of one of Matt's recent columns. I'm with you now. Max Boot—“gelatinous mediocrity”—and so forth and so on. You say they've got a story?

JOHN: They do!

What do you say?

MATT: I mean, I understand what John's saying. I think there's even some validity to that. But I'm the the son of a news reporter. I grew up in newsrooms around reporters, not around politicians, not around op-ed people, ideologues, right? My father was not in the narrative business. Reporters, as a group, were people who, when they did a story, on the night that the story was about to be published they could not sleep because they were afraid they got some little fact in there wrong that was gonna ruin their reputations. That was like a commonality for every person in the journalism business.

So getting something huge wrong, like this idea that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction just around the corner—“Trust us, it's right over that hill”—and you do trust them and you put it in the news and it turns out not to be right, that's the kind of thing that you would not be able to live down if you were just purely a reporter.

And I understand what you're saying, but there's a distinction. And this is what I was talking about, how there's been a drastic change in the way we do business. We are in the narrative business. Now, we didn't used to be. We were really more in the business of saying here's what we know, we called all around, and this is what this person says, and this is what this person says, and this is what the official statements are. Here's the information. We checked it. You do what you want with it, you make your own decisions, and then we'll come back tomorrow and give you what we got since then. Now it's not really like that. Now we're in what Wesley Lowery calls the moral clarity business, which is we're trying to drive audiences in a direction. I think we do that more than we used to. Much more.

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