How Clickbait Changed Journalism w/Matt Taibi | Joe Rogan

How much is media shifting now? You've obviously been a journalist for a long time. How much are things changing in the light of the internet? Well, a lot. And this is why I have a new book out now that's really about this, right? Why the business has changed. What's it called? HATE Inc. Yeah, it's out now. And it's really about how the press, the business model, the press has changed. I mean, it's something that you talk about a lot. I hear you on your show all the time talking about how news agencies are always trying to push narratives on people, trying to get people wound up and upset. And that is a conscious business strategy that we didn't have maybe 30 years ago. You think about Walter Cronkite or what the news was like back in the day. You had the whole family sitting around the table and everybody watching, sort of a unifying experience to watch the news. Now you have news for the crazy right-wing uncle and then you have news for the kid in the Shay T-shirt and their different channels and they're trying to wind these people up to get them upset constantly and stay there. And a lot of that has to do with the internet because before the internet, news companies had like a basically free way of making money. They dominated distribution. Newspaper was the only thing in town that had a, you know, if you wanted to get a want it had to be through the local newspaper. Now with the internet, the internet is the distribution system. Anybody has access to it, not just the local newspaper. And so the easy money is gone and we have to chase clicks more than we ever had to before. We have to chase eyeballs more than we have to. So we've had to build new money-making strategies and a lot of it has to do with just sort of monetizing anger and division and all these things. We just didn't do that before and it had a profound difference on the media. As a writer, have you personally experienced this sort of the influence where people have tried to lean you in the direction of clickbait or perhaps maybe alter titles that make them a little bit disingenuous in order to get people excited about the story? I mean, you know, my editors at Rolling Stone are pretty good and they gave me a lot of leeway to kind of explore whatever I want to explore. But I definitely feel a lot of pressure that I didn't feel before in the business because especially in the Trump era and, you know, I've written a lot about the Russia story, right? But, you know, that's an example of one size media does has one take on it and another size media has another take on it. And if you are just a journalist and you want to just sort of report the facts, you feel a lot of pressure to fit the facts into a narrative that your audience is going to like. And I had a lot of problem with the Russia story because I thought, you know, I don't like Donald Trump, but I'm like, I don't think this guy's James Bond consorting with Russian spies. I think he's corrupt in other ways. And there was a lot of blowback on my side of the business because, you know, people in sort of liberal, quote unquote liberal media, you just have a there's a lot of pressure to have everybody fit into a certain narrative. And I think that's really unhealthy for the business. Yeah, very unhealthy, right? Because as soon as people can be manipulated to conform into that narrative, then all sorts of stories can be shifted. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you the job used to be about challenging your audience every now and then, right? Like if you think a certain thing is true, well, it's our job to give you the bad news and say that you're wrong about that. That used to be what the job was to be a journalist. Now it's the opposite. Now we have an audience. We're going to tell you exactly what you want to hear and what you and we're going to reinforce what you think. And that's very unhealthy. A great example of this was in the summer of 2016, I was covering the campaign. I started to hear reporters talking about how they didn't want to report poll numbers that showed the race was close. They thought that that was going to hurt Hillary. Right? Like, in other words, we had information that the race was close. And we're not telling this to audiences because they wanted to hear that it was going to be a blowout for Hillary. Right. That didn't help Hillary. It didn't help the Democrats to not warn people about this. But it was just because if you turned on MSNBC or CNN and you heard that Trump was within five points or whatever it was, that was going to be a bummer for that audience. So we stayed away from it. And this is the kind of thing that it's not politically beneficial to anybody. It's just we're just trying to keep people glued to the set by telling them what they want to hear. And that's not the news. That's not our job. You know? And it drives me crazy. Yeah, it should drive you crazy. What you said about journalism being used to be something that you're challenging your reader. You're giving them this reality that may be uncomfortable. But it's educational and expands their view of the world. Where do they get that now? They don't. That's the whole problem. Like, you can predict exactly what each news organization, what their take is going to be on any issue by going... Just to take an example, when the business about the ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, being killed hit the news, instantaneously you knew that the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, that they were going to write a whole bunch of stories about how Trump was overplaying the significance of it, that he was telling lies about it. You knew they were going to make the entire thing about Trump. And then meanwhile, Fox had a completely different spin on about how heroic it was. But news audiences didn't have anywhere to go to just simply hear who was this person, why was he important, what were the... What do the people in the region think? What kind of... What is this going to mean going forward? Is it actually going to have any impact? Are we going to have to continually... Is there going to be a new person like this every time? Are we actually accomplishing anything? You don't get that anywhere. All you get is Trump is a shithead on one side and Trump is a hero on the other side. That's not the news. No. But the thing is, it's like the business aspect of it is so weird. Like you have your guys like Hannity, or you can absolutely predict what that guy's going to say every single time. You know what side he's on and he's blatant about it. And when you see someone like that, you go, okay, well this is peak bullshit. So where do we go where I see both sides? Where's the middle ground where someone goes, well, this is true, but you got to say this is honest too and this is what's going on over on this side. And the Republicans have a point here and there's no mainstream media place where you can go for that right now. No, there isn't. And that's... I mean, this is one of the things I read about. This is one of the reasons why shows like yours are so popular. I mean, I think there's a complete loss of trust that they feel like people are not being honest with them, right? They're not being straight. And they come to people like you and a lot of other sort of independent folks who aren't like the quote unquote mainstream media because it's not really thought, it's not reporting, it's not anything. If you can predict 100% what a person is going to say, that's not thinking, that's not reporting, that's not...it's just marketing. But for someone like me, that's so disturbing. I'm a fucking comedian and a cage fighting commentator. When people are coming to me, like this is the source where you go for unbiased representations of what's going on in the world, that's crazy. Well, I mean, let's just...I mean, I started interviewing with Barry Weiss, right? And you just...you did a simple...you didn't go to journalism school, right? No. No. You did something about how, you know, oh, she's an Assad, Todi, and you said, what does that mean? You just asked the simple basic questions, right? What does that mean? Where is that coming from? How do you know that? You know? Like, journalism isn't brain surgery. That's all it is. It's just asking the simple questions that sort of pop to mind when you're in a situation, like where did this happen? How do we know that? I mean, that's true. But there's a whole generation of people in the pressnet who just simply do not go through the process of just asking simple questions. How do I know that's true? Like, after each story you report, you're supposed to kind of, like, wipe your memory clean and start over. So just because somebody was banned the last time you covered them doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to be the bad guy this time you cover them, right? You have to continually test your assumptions and ask yourself, is this true? Is that true? Is this true? Is this true? And we've just stopped doing that. Like, it's just a morass of, like, pre-written takes on things. And it's really, really bad. And you can see why audiences are fleeing from this stuff. They just don't have the impact they used to. Well, it's really interesting that a lot of this is this unpredicted consequence of having these open platforms like Facebook, where people are getting their news, and then the algorithm sort of directs them towards things that are going to piss them off, which I don't even think necessarily was initially the plan. I think the plan is to accelerate engagement, right? So they find out what you're engaging with, what stories you're engaging with, and then they give you more of that. Like Ari, my friend Ari Shafir, actually tried this out. And what he did was he went on YouTube and only looked up puppy videos. And that's all he looked at for, like, weeks. And then YouTube only started recommending puppy videos to him. So it's not necessarily that Facebook wants you to be outraged, but that when you are outraged, whether it's over abortion or war, whatever the subject is, you're going to engage more and their algorithm favors you engaging more. So if you're engaging more about something very positive, you know, if you're all about yoga and meditation, your algorithm would probably favor yoga and meditation because those are the things that you engage with. But it's natural for people to be pissed off and to look for things that are annoying, especially if you're done working and you're like, God, this world sucks. What's going on that sucks worse? And then you go to your Facebook and, oh, Jesus, look at this goddamn border crisis. Oh, Jesus, look at this. Well, fucking, here's the problem with these goddamn liberal, they don't know shit. And you engage and then that's your life. And then it's saying, oh, I know how to get Matt Hall fired up. I'm going to fucking send him some abortion stories. Woo. And then that's your feed. Right. Absolutely. But there's so many economic incentives that go in there, right? They know the more that you engage, the longer that you're on, the more ads that you're going to see. Right. So that same dynamic that Facebook and the social media companies figured out, which is that if you keep feeding somebody something that, you know, has been proven to spin that person up and get them wound up, that they're going to come back for more of it and they're going to keep coming back. And actually you can expand their desire to see that stuff by making them sort of more angry overall and they will come back and they will spend more and more and more time. Well, the news companies figured out the same thing and they're just funneling stuff at you that they know you're going to just be in an endless cycle of sort of impotent mute rage all the time. But it's kind of addicting, you know? And they know that. And it's sort of like the tobacco companies. They know it's a product that's bad for you and they just keep giving it to you because, you know, it makes money for them. Yeah. And it's just the thing about it is all of it is about ads and how many clicks they get in ads. If they just said, you can have a social media company, but you can't have ads. There's a new federal law. No more ads on Facebook. No more ads on YouTube. No more ads on Twitter. No more ads on Instagram. Good luck. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like a couple of apps. Yup. Yeah. But that seems to be what it is. It's like they figured out that your data is worth a tremendous amount of money. Mm-hmm. And the way they can utilize that money is to sell advertising. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, they get it coming and going. Yes. They're not only selling you ads, but they're also collecting the information about your habits, which they can then sell again. Yeah. So it's a dual revenue stream. You know, the media companies, basically, they're just consumer businesses where they're they're trading attention for ad space, right? So if they can get you to watch four hours of television a day, they have that many ad slots that they can show you, and they know how much money they're going to make. But the social media companies get it two ways. They get it by attracting your eyeballs and then also selling your habits to the next set of advertisers, which is very insidious. But what's interesting about this is that most people don't think about this as a consumer business, right? American's users are very conscious of what they put in their bodies. They won't eat too many candy. Well, depending on who they are, right? But people at least look at what the calories are, but they don't think about the news that way or social media, what they put in their brains. And it's also a consumer product. Yeah, it really is. I've gone over that many times with people that that's a diet. This is your diet. You have a mental diet as well as you have a physical food diet. Absolutely. You have an information diet. And a lot of people are just eating shit with their brain. It's the worst kind of junk food. It's like a cigarette sandwich, the stuff that we eat. It's so fucking bad. And it's getting worse. It is. It is getting worse. And what's weird is that this is a 10-year-old problem and no one saw it coming. And it's kind of overtaking politics. It's overtaking social discourse. Everybody's wrapped up in social media conversations. They carry them on over to the dinner table. And it gets people in arguments at work. And all this stuff, no one saw coming. No one saw this outrage economy from social media sites, from things like Facebook. No one saw that. No one ever predicted that your data was going to be so valuable. No. Who the fuck saw that? I don't think anybody, I mean, I think some people in the tech business probably saw early on the potential for this. But in terms of other businesses like the news media and also politics, I mean, you have to think about the impact of this on politics. It's been enormous. I covered Donald Trump. Trump really was just all about whatever you're pissed off about, I'm right there with you. And people are just sort of pissed off about lots of things these days because they're doing this all day long. And if you can take advantage of that, then you're going to have a lot of success. And I think a lot of people haven't figured that out. And some of these things are real causes. Like people are upset about real things. But it's just, you're absolutely right, people did not see this coming and they didn't prepare for it. It's just weird that it's one of the biggest sources of income online and people didn't see it coming. I mean, Facebook is generating billions of dollars. And now, potentially shifting global politics. Yeah, and the whole issue of a couple of companies like Facebook having control over what you do and do not see is an enormous problem that nobody really cares about. I've tried to write about it a few times. I've written a couple of features about it. And about how, what a serious problem this is. Like if you look in other countries like Israel, China, there are a number of companies where you've seen this pattern of internet platforms liaising with the government to decide what people can and cannot see. And they'll say, well, we don't want to see Palestinian protest movements, we don't want to see the Venezuelan channel, Telesor, we want to take that off. You think about how that could end up happening in the United States, and it is already a little bit happening. It's a little bit, but it seems to be happening only in the terms of leaning towards the progressive side, which people are OK with. Because they think, especially in the light of Donald Trump being in office, this is acceptable censorship. Yeah, but I think they're wrong about that. I think they're wrong about that too. Yeah, and it's terribly dangerous. It's very short-sighted. Yes, and I think there's also this thing that happens with people where they think, well, this is never going to happen to me. You can do that bad thing to this person that I don't like, but as long as it's never going to happen to me. Exactly. But they're wrong. I mean, history shows it always does happen to you. So we're giving these companies an enormous amount of power to decide all kinds of things, what we look at, what kind of political ideas we can be exposed to. I think it's very, very dangerous. That biased interpretation of what something is, that was what people talked about when the initial Patriot Act was enacted, when people were like, hey, this might be fine with Obama in office. Maybe Obama is not going to enact some of the worst clauses of this and use it on people. Or the, was it NDAA? Is that what it was? Yeah. Some of the things were just completely unconstitutional. But don't worry, we're not going to use those. But you're setting these tools aside for whatever fucking president we have. Like, what if we have a guy who out trumps Trump? I mean, we never thought we'd have a Trump, right? What if we have a next level guy post Trump? What if there's some sort of catastrophe, tragedy, attack, something that really gets people fired up, and they vote in someone who takes it up to another level? And then he has these tools. And then he uses these tools on his political enemies, which is entirely possible. Well, I mean, we've already seen that a little bit. I mean, people don't want to bring this up. But a lot of the stories that have come out about Trump, they're coming from leaks of classified information that are coming from those war on terror programs that were instituted after 9-11. The Fis and Amendments Act, the NSA programs to collect data. They're unmasking people. We have a lot of evidence now that there was a lawsuit a couple that came out about a month ago that showed that the FBI was doing something like 60,000 searches a month at one point where they were asking the NSA for the ability to unmask names and that sort of thing. So these tools are incredibly powerful. They're incredibly dangerous. But people thought after 9-11, they were scared. So we want to protect ourselves. So that's OK for now. We'll pull it back later. But you never do pull it back. You know what I mean? It always ends up being used by somebody in the wrong way. And I think we're starting to see that that's going to be a problem. Yeah, I'm real concerned about places like Google and Facebook altering the path of free speech and leaning people in certain directions and silencing people that have opposing viewpoints. And the fact that they think that they're doing this for good because this is how they see the world and they don't understand that you have to let these ideas play out in the marketplace of free speech and free ideas. If you don't do that, if you don't do that, if you don't let people debate the merits, the pros, the cons, what's wrong, what's right, if you don't do that, then you don't get real discourse. If you don't get real discourse, you're essentially, you've got some sort of intellectual dictatorship going on. And because it's a progressive dictatorship, you think it's OK. Because it's people who want everybody to be inclusive. I mean, this is a weird time for that. It's a really weird time for that because, as you said, people are so short-sighted, they don't understand that these, like, the First Amendment's in place for a very good reason and set up a long fucking time ago because they did the math. They saw where it was going and they were like, look, we have to have the ability to express ourselves. We have to have the ability to freely express thoughts and ideas and challenge people that are in a position of power because if we don't, we wind up exactly where we came from. Yeah, no. And courts continually reaffirmed that idea that the way to deal with bad speech was with more speech. And they did it over and over and over again. The legal standard for speech still, I think, remains that unless it's directly inciting violence, like, you can have speech that incites violence generally. And the Supreme Court even upheld that. You can have speech that comes from material that was stolen illegally. That's OK. But we had a very, very high bar for prohibiting speech always. And the libel cases, the cases for defamation, that also established a very, very high standard for punishing speech. But now all of a sudden, people have a completely different idea about it. It's like, forget about the fact that this was a fundamental concept in American society for 230 years or whatever, but they just want to change it without thinking about the consequences. Well, that's where a guy like Trump could be almost like a Trojan horse, in a way. If you wanted to play 3D chess, which you would do, you'd get a guy who's just so egregious and so outrageous, and then so many people oppose him, get that guy, let him get into a position of power, and then sit back, watch the outrage bubble, and then take advantage of that and funnel people into certain directions. I don't think that's what's happening. But if I was super fucking tinfoil haddy, that's how I would go about it. I would say, this is what you want. If you really want to change things for your direction, put someone that opposes it that's disgusting. And that way, people just a rational, intelligent person is never going to side with him. So they're going to side with the people that oppose him, and then you could sneak a lot of shit in that maybe they wouldn't agree with in any other circumstance. Trump's election is sort of like another 9-11, right? 9-11 happened all of a sudden. People who weren't in favor of the government being able to go through your library records or listen to your phone calls, and all of a sudden, they were like, oh, Jesus, I'm so freaked out. Yeah, fine. When Trump got elected, all of a sudden, people suddenly had very different ideas about speech. Hey, that guy's so bad that maybe we should consider banning X, Y, and Z. And yeah, if he was conceived as a way to discredit the First Amendment and some other ideas, that would be a brilliant 3D chess move. Yeah, super sneaky. That's like China level, many steps ahead. Yeah, exactly.