On "Rising": Debating Briahna Joy Gray

An attempt to correct the record turns a tad heated. Thanks to the hosts

On Monday, The Hill’s excellent “Rising” show featuring hosts Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray featured a segment about controversial comments I made on Substack Notes last week. Briahna, with whom I’ve always gotten along, made a series of statements I believed should be corrected. I wrote, hoping this would be dealt with quietly via corrections, but it didn’t work out, and instead they were good enough to have me on for the above segment today. Things got hot.

I’d counted at least six issues with the Monday show. For instance, Briahna described reading a recent tweet of mine, in which I posted one of Elon Musk’s texts about shadowbanning me. Appearing genuinely moved to anger that I’d held my tongue about Elon for so long, she exclaimed:

So this is a contemporary instance where Taibbi has evidence that [Musk] is censoring a major reporter like Matt Taibbi, and he declined… for a year, almost a year, to actually tell the public of this!

But as Racket readers know, I announced all this as it was happening last year, relaying the quote about a “blanket search ban” and explaining “all of my Twitter Files threads had been disabled.” I know Brie read that “Meet the Censored: Me?” piece, because she referenced it in a critical way on another Rising segment a year ago. So that’s odd! She added I had “to date, still not really criticized” Elon (I’ve done so regularly), then claimed that “by the way, there weren’t more Twitter Files” to be had at the time I was cut off by Musk, because “as I understand it,” the documents came from “one cache” all the Twitter Files reporters got, presumably at an early juncture.

But there wasn’t one cache, but dozens, collected at different times via different search methodologies, and I was still waiting for results the day things fell apart. This last claim had particular sting because it implied I was keeping mum about Elon’s peccadilloes for a story I wasn’t even getting anymore. No one’s ever said anything about there only being one batch of files, that’s not in any reporting anywhere. I didn’t know the project was over until Elon went on Spaces and said the story was “done, there’s not much left really… we need to move on.” Again, Brie had to know this, because that Rising segment last year contained clips of me publicly urging Elon to continue the project with other reporters. So, how? There was no answer when I asked.

All this was delivered in a prosecutorial manner, with Brie talking once and again about what I’d “admitted” and “acknowledged,” like I’d confessed something. Summarizing these admissions, she impugned my ethics: “Maybe there’s something other than trying to preserve his relationship with Elon for the sake of journalism.”

Yikes. In fact there is — it’s a bad business generally to go after sources in public no matter how they behave, because it makes other potential sources nervous about opening up to you — but that’s obviously not what she meant.

The plot twist is that all of this got complicated anew today:

In the above video you’ll hear me referencing claims that I only searched for incidents of censorship on the right and not on the left, and explaining that actually I searched for neither and just focused on the agencies. You’ll hear her respond that she never said any such thing, that she was just pointing out the true statement that I’d admitted I didn’t run even one search on, say, Bernie Sanders.

However, she did say Monday that I’d searched one side and not the other:

If you are substantively and genuinely committed in looking at censorship campaigns, you are going to at least do an investigation, do a search, do a word search that is broader than just terms that are associated with attacks on the right…I was surprised that he didn’t even out of the Vegas curiosity, put Bernie or any of those other 2016 or 2020 related search terms into it to even see if there was any censorship happening.

When I pushed back on this, she denied everything. Again, these are exact quotes:

April 1: “He acknowledged to me that he hadn't searched for censorship against the left the way that he had been searching for against the right.”

April 4: “I didn't say you had done searches for one side than the other.”

At another point in the show, I was trying to point out that I’ve been doing stories about censorship of figures on the left for years, and she replied:

BJG: It’s because you’ve done so much of that reporting from the left perspective… that there is a frustration that reporting hasn’t seemed to continue since the last few years or so. And so when you DM’ed me about your concerns about what I said…

MT: But that was reporting from the last few years.

BJG: But Matt, when you DM’ed me about your concerns about the last segment, you linked several articles, the most recent of which was from 2022. There was another from 2018…

You can see the shock on my face. I sent links to the “Labour Files” stories from January of this year and November of last year, as well as the story about the Consortium News lawsuit against Newsguard, which happened at last in part because of information I was happy to help Consortium get from the firm. I also mentioned Twitter Files reports about figures on the left (Aaron Mate, Truthout, Consortium, etc.) and could have mentioned that my statement to Congress mentioned the gilets jaunes and the South American socialist channel teleSUR. There were links to to recent discussions about censorship in Palestine (e.g. in this segment with Glenn Greenwald).

I don’t want to pile on Brie, but if you don’t answer a complaint letter, but do go through it carefully enough to claim something like its most recent link being from 2022, how do you miss stuff like this?

The degree of difficulty factor on the Twitter Files, in terms of ethical and logistical considerations in addition to the sheer quantity of stuff and the freaky one in a zillion personality of the main source, was like nothing I’d dealt with, a 40 on a scale of 1 to 10. So, it was frustrating when I went on Brie’s show Bad Faith in the middle of the circus and found myself answering contentious questions about things like not doing Bernie searches or not knowing exactly how results were being sorted.

This is all in one show. It's almost impossible to make that many mistakes and inventions in one show. Then to top it off, she went on "Bad Faith" and said, "Mea culpa, I’m human, and I’m happy to correct any of those [mistakes] when they're pointed out to me." I mean, what the fuck? Who does that?

I’m opening this piece because she’s claiming now to be a victim of The Hill’s bad ethics, when she herself clearly has a problem and shouldn’t be on the air.