Matt Taibbi on How We Can Get Journalism Back on Track

How do you get journalism back on track? Is it possible at this point? I mean, is it a lost art? Is it going to be like calligraphy? I mean, I think... Yeah, right. Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. The Japanese calligraphy, right? You have to pass it down through masters or the ages. Yeah, maybe that's going to be what journalism is like. I mean, there's two things that could happen. One is that, like, if you created something like Neither Side News right now, right? And just like a... That's a great name. Yeah, like a network where it was a bunch of people who just kind of did the job without the editorializing. I think it would have... It would probably have a lot of followers right away. It would make money. And nobody has clued into that yet. Like, if some canny entrepreneur were to do that and that were to bring back the business, that or, you know, journalism has always been kind of quasi-subsidized in this country. You know, going back to the Pony Express, newspapers were carried free across to the West, right? The US Postal Service did that. The original Communications Act in 1934, the idea was, you know, you could lease the public airways but you had to do something in the public interest. So you could make money doing sports and entertainment, but you could take a loss on news. And so it was kind of quasi-subsidized in that way. But that doesn't exist anymore. There's no subsidy really for news anymore. I'm not sure I agree with that being the way to go, but there has to be something. Because right now the financial pressure to be bad is just too great, you know? Like, there's no way to... Sorry to go on this, but when I came from the business, when the money started getting tighter, the first thing they got rid of were the long-form investigative reporters. Like, you couldn't just hire somebody to work on a story for three months anymore because you needed them to do content all the time. Then they got rid of the fact checkers, you know, which had another serious problem, you know? And so now the money's so tight that you just have these people doing clickbait all the time and they're not doing real reporting. And so they have to fix the money problem. I don't know how they would do that though. How much has it changed recently? Because like, when that piece of... The stuff that you wrote about the banking crisis was my favorite coverage of it and the most relatable and understandable and the way you spelled everything out. Could you do that today? Yeah, but I think it would be harder because... That's not that long ago. It really isn't. It's only, you know, that was... I really stopped doing that in like 2014 or so. Yeah, so we're five years out. But the big difference is social media has had a huge impact on attention span. So I was writing like 7,000 word articles about credit default swaps and stuff like that. And I was trying really hard to make it interesting for people. You know, you use jokes and humor and stuff like that. But now people would not have the energy to really fight through that. You'd have to make it shorter. Even TV, you know, people... You don't see that kind of reporting, that in depth kind of process reporting where you're teaching people something because people just tune out right away. They need just a quick hit, a headline and a couple of facts. So yeah, there's a big problem with audience, right? We've trained audiences to consume the news differently. And all they really want to get is a take now. It's like everything's like an ESPN hot take and things, you know? So that's not good. The counter to that though is this, what we're doing right now. These are always these long ass conversations. They're hours and hours long. And there's a bunch of them out there now. It's not like mine is an isolated one. And there's so many podcasts that cover, and some of them cover them like in a serial form, like the Dropout. Was that what they called it? Yes. Was the Dropout, was the one about that woman who created that fake blood company. Oh yes, right. Susan, what was her name? Elizabeth. What was her name? Elizabeth Holmes. That's right. Theranos. Yeah. The completely fraudulent company. That was an amazing podcast series. That if I read it, I probably, you're right. I probably would have like, boring. Right. I think I was going to abandon it earlier, but listening to it in podcast form, listening to actual conversations from these people, listening to people's interpretations of these conversations, listening to people that were there at the time, telling stories about when they knew things were weird and when they started noticing there's tests that were incorrect, that they were covering up, that kind of shit. You can do that now with something like this. I think that one of the good things about podcasts too is you don't need anybody to tell you that you could publish this. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you're right. I think formats like this reveal that the news companies are wrong about some things, about audiences. They think that people can't handle an in-depth discussion about things. They think that audiences only want to watch 30 seconds of something. They don't. They're interested. They do have curiosity about things. It's very difficult to convince people in the news business especially to take chances on that kind of content. They'll do it for a podcast. They'll do it for a documentary. For the news, they're making things shorter and shorter and shorter. I was really lucky to have an editor who understood the idea that we have to get into this in depth or else it's going to be meaningless to people. That's pretty rare. For the most part, you don't see them taking that kind of bet anymore. Maybe podcasts will help people puncture that. The flip side of that is that they're not investing in stuff like international news in the way they used to. When I came up in the business, every bureau, every big network had bureaus in every major city around the world. Rome, Berlin, Moscow, whatever it is. They had newsrooms full of people who were out there gathering news. Now there's none of that because they figured out they can make the money just as easily by having somebody sit in an office in Washington or New York and just link to something and have a take on something. I think the news is getting worse. Podcasts are getting more interesting. Maybe there's a happy medium they can find in between. Documentaries as well. Documentaries are commercially viable if it's a great subject. Like a good example is that wild, wild country one. I didn't even know that that cult existed. I had no idea what happened up there. This documentary sheds light on it. It does it over, I think it was like six episodes or something like that. It's fucking amazing. It made a shit ton of money. Or making a murderer was another one I thought was really good. That's something that happens all over the place. You have these criminal justice cases and they're terrible and justices happen. If you really tell the whole story and make characters out of people and invest the time and energy to tell it well, people still like really good storytelling. I think within the news business they have this belief, their hard headed belief that people can't handle difficult material. I don't know why that is. Yeah I don't know why it is either. I mean I think there's a large number of people that aren't satisfied intellectually by a lot of the stuff they're being spoon fed. They think that because the vast majority of things that are commercially viable are short attention span things. I think it's like this real sloppy way of thinking, non-risk taking way of thinking. They're like, this is how people consume things. You got to give them like a music video style editing or they just tune out. There's always been a thirst for actual long form conversations. An actual real in depth exploration of something in a very digestible way. One of the good things about doing your podcast or this podcast, any podcast really, is that you can listen to it while you're commuting. You listen to it and it'll actually give you something that occupies your mind and interests you during what would normally be dead time. Right. You're absolutely right about the thirst for something else. Again, I think when people turn on most news products, they're getting this predictable set of things and that doesn't quench that thirst for them. They're not being challenged in any way. They're not seeing different sides of a topic. You're not approaching covering a subject honestly by genuinely exploring the idea that people you may have thought were bad or right or people you may have thought are good or wrong. It's just all predictable. I think people are fleeing to other things now. They want to just get the story. They don't want to have a whole lot of editorializing on top of it. I think also there's a lot of underestimating of audiences going out there. We just think that they can't handle stuff and they can. They're interested but we just take it for granted that they can't do it. Maybe I'm guilty of that too because I've been doing this for so long but yeah, it does happen. I don't think people have changed that much. Yeah, no, probably not. It's just difficult. Maybe it's also we don't have the stamina to stick with a story in the same way that we used to. Now if a story doesn't get a million hits right away, we don't return to the subject. You think about stories like Watergate. When Woodburn and Bernstein first did those stories, they were complete duds. Everybody thought they were on the wrong path. They were the only people who were covering it. A lot of those stories kind of flailed around. They didn't get the big response. It wasn't until much later that it became this hot thing that everybody was watching. That wouldn't happen now. If reporters were on a story, if it didn't catch fire within the first couple of passes, your editor's probably going to take you off it now. What was that story that the New York Times worked on about Trump and they worked on it for a long time and it was released and went in and out of the news cycle in a matter of days and nobody gave a fuck? Yeah, the one about his finances. Yes. It was like a 36,000 word story. It was like unbelievable. It was like six times as big as the biggest story I've ever written in my life. They thought it was a giant takedown. Right, yeah. It was like a 36 hour thing if that. Maybe. Maybe, yeah. People kind of said, oh, this is amazing. It's got all this information in it and it just fell flat. The important thing about that is that news companies see this and they say, wow, we invested all this time and money. We put our really good reporters on this. We gave them six months to work on something and it got the same amount of hits as some story about a carp with a human face that was filmed in China. You know what I mean? Like something that we picked off the wires and we stuck it in page 11, whatever it was. What that tells them, the incentives now are let's not bother. Let's not do six months investigations of anything anymore because what's the point? We're going to get as many hits doing something dumb. They just don't take their risk anymore. God, it's so crazy that that's the incentive now that it's all clicks. It's such a strange trap to fall into. There's also the other thing, which is the litigation problem. This is another thing I wrote about in the book is that there was a series of cases in the 80s and 90s where reporters kind of took on big companies. I remember the Chiquita Banana thing that the Cincinnati Inquirer did. I remember the movie The Insider, about Brian and Williamson, the tobacco company, CBS. There was another one with Monsanto in Florida where some Fox reporters went after Monsanto. They all got sued and it cost their companies a ton of money and reputational risk. After that, what news companies said is, why take on a big company that can fight back and throw a lawsuit at us and what do we win by that? We're not going to get more audience from that. Now if you watch consumer reporting at a small TV station, usually they're going to bang on some little Chinese restaurant that has roaches or something like that. They're not going to go after Monsanto or Chiquita Banana because there's no point. It's too much of a risk. They just don't do it. That's another thing that's gone wrong with reporting. The economic benefit of going after a powerful adversary isn't there anymore, so they don't do it. That's a problem. Now clearly you've seen a giant change in journalism from when you first started to where we are now. Do you have any fears or concerns about the future of it? This is what you do for a living. What are your thoughts on it? Where do you think it's going? I'm really worried about it because you need the journalists to kind of exist apart from politics and to be a check on everything. The whole idea of having a fourth estate is that it's separate from the political parties. I don't work for the DNC. It's not my job to write bad news about Donald Trump. That's the DNC's job. They put up press releases about them. If people see us as being indistinguishable from political parties or being all editorial, then we don't have any power anymore. That's the first thing. The press doesn't have any ability to influence people if people don't see us as independent and truthful and all those things. That's what I really worry about right now is people will stop listening to the media. They'll still tune us out. They don't trust us anymore. Walter Cronkite from 1972, the Gallup poll agency found that he was the most trusted man in America. That was true also in 1985. For 13 consecutive years, he was the most trusted. There's no reporter in America who's trusted. The most trusted man in America? That doesn't exist. Yeah, it doesn't exist. Good luck. Yeah, exactly. People think of us as clowns and entertainment figures. How are you going to impact the world if people think you're a joke? That's what I really worry about. We don't have any institutional self-respect anymore. We don't feel like we have to challenge audiences, challenge powerful people. It's just a bunch of talking points, and that's not what the business is about. I worry about it. I think there are a lot of journalists who say the same thing. We all talk amongst ourselves, which is the job as we knew it is being phased out and changed into something else. That's not a good thing. People do need, in tough times, people need the press as ridiculous as that sounds now. But it's true. I don't know where we go from here. Legitimate journalism is so important. It's so important. It's the only way you really find out what's going on. It's the only way. You're not going to find out through the depictions of the people that were actually involved in it, that want you to see it a certain way. You're not going to find that from people that have financial incentives and given you a specific narrative. You need real journalism. It's so hard to find. I think it's one of the reasons why we're so lost. It's one of the more insidious aspects of the term fake news, because, God damn, that's so easy to throw around. It's like it's so easy to call someone a bigot. It's so easy to call someone a racist. It's so easy to say fake news. They all have the same sort of effect. They just diminish anything that you have to say, almost instantaneously. Totally. When you can cast the entire news as being fake, people can tune in and out. But a lot of that has to do with who's doing the news reading now. In the 60s and 70s, maybe before, reporters, a lot of them came from the middle of nowhere classes. The job was originally kind of like being a plumber. It was more of a trade than a profession. You had a lot of people who went into the job and they had this kind of attitude of just wanting to stick it to the man. They didn't want to be close to power. They wanted to take it on. People like Seymour Hirsch. If you see that kind of personality who just wants to take the truth and rub it in somebody's face. But then after all the president's men, it became this sexy thing to be a journalist. You saw a lot of people from my generation who went into journalism because they wanted to be close to politicians and hang out with them. It's kind of like the primary colors thing, right? Where you see people who they just want to have a beer with the presidential candidate. That's totally different from what it used to be. Now we're on the wrong side of the rope line. You see what I'm saying? We used to be outside of power taking it on. Now we're more upper class in the press and we're kind of in bed with the same people we were supposed to be covering. That's not a good thing. When people see that, that's one of the reasons why they call us fake news. They see us as doing PR for rich people. They see us as doing PR for rich people.