Transcript - America This Week, Feb 7, 2025: "The Big Store: Politico, USAID, and Managed Reality."

Walter and Matt discuss mainstream media outlets that have government as giant customers. Also, "The Story of an Hour," by Kate Chopin

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you doing?

Walter Kirn: Not as well as you. It looks like you’re in one of the top hotel chains in America with that dim gray interrogation cell lighting and-

Matt Taibbi: You don’t like this very distinctive backing to this generic bed that I’m sleeping on, behind me?

Walter Kirn: One time I saw an actual convention in Vegas that sold commercial art, in other words, the art that goes into motel rooms and offices.

Matt Taibbi: Awesome.

Walter Kirn: Yeah and how they pick, I have no idea because ... except at random, they have everything-

Matt Taibbi: It’s got to be a wine person.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Everything boring. Little boy fishing on bridge. Horse running through the snow.

Matt Taibbi: Funny, if they had the Jheronimus Bosch Hotel where it would be ... It’s absolutely the other kind of art, like the most disturbing conceivable imagery, sobering like hyper-realistic religious imagery, that kind of stuff.

Walter Kirn: Well, not to go too far afield, but there is a hotel called the Hotel Zaza in Texas, which is believed to be controlled, well, one of the rooms at least, by the Skull and Bones Society of Yale.

Matt Taibbi: Nice.

Walter Kirn: It does have disturbing art and strange Masonic Numerological details. So there is such a place.

Matt Taibbi: It’s a dumb leader for the bodies.

Walter Kirn: Just about, man. Just about 322, I think that’s the number, 322.

Matt Taibbi: So speaking of which-

Walter Kirn: Yes, yes. Well, speaking of conspiracies and behind the scenes payoffs and things like that.

Matt Taibbi: So we obviously did a show on Monday night, and that’s when the USAID, Pandora’s Box started to open, and I think you actually predicted that the media would become a subject of all of this.

Walter Kirn: I predicted it that night, and many people came back pretty much the next day or the day after to say, it’s happening,

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and it’s kind of panned out, kind of, sort of. A lot of media companies, it turns out, were accepting the USAID money. Now, to be fair, which we absolutely should be, media companies very often have large government contracts because they’re often some of the biggest customers of media companies. Same with firms like NewsGuard, they have big government contracts because every government outlet has a NewsGuard subscription, which is one of the reasons I can’t stand it because it’s making every public library in the country use those sorting systems, but everybody subscribes, every government outlet subscribes to the New York Times and a bunch of other outlets, and it’s a nice little chunk of change for media companies.

And that’s a nice little scam for the mainstream press, that’s not available to the alternative press, and good for them, I guess. But it gets a little weird when the numbers get super high, right? And Politico, I think is the one that stands out this week. They had, I think it was eight million dollars for ... was it this year and then 8.2 million. And if you add up all the contracts, if you look at it all, I think it’s like 34.3 million. And I can’t think of a way that that ... Can you think of a way that number makes sense as subscriptions or something like that?

Walter Kirn: Well, I mean, as a publisher, myself of County Highway, I can only tell you that if that kind of money were to flow in or anything proportional to that kind of money for us at our size, it would be a huge obligation to keep it coming. It would be a debt, both moral and financial in some ways that once accepted would guide a lot of decisions. So the idea that they can remain independent while this kind of flow comes in is ridiculous to me. One major advertiser at a newspaper magazine, speaking up can be a problem for you editorially. And remember, they do have advertisers, and among the advertisers is this other interest, the US government. So the idea that these places can in any way, I don’t know, just pretend to be detached from that is absurd.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, so there’s an interesting contrast here between the New York Times, which got caught up in this briefly because some people ... there were some computational errors with how people ran the searches. They actually received over a period of time, about a million and a half dollars from DOD and other agencies, which roughly makes sense if you figure every government outlet in the Pentagon is subscribing to the New York Times. But if you compare that number to the overall income of the New York Times and all their subscribers, it’s not a massive, massive amount of money. But for Politico, which has a much smaller staff, it doesn’t put out a physical paper.

There’s a much more concentrated benefit there. And in the internet world, it can be roughly equivalent in impact, right? So you can see a Politico story that will circulate all over the place in the same way the New York Times story will, but the Times is putting on a much larger volume of stuff compared to Politico. Does that make sense?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: So I guess what I’m saying is eight million dollars a year or 34 million dollars over a period of years to Politico is exponentially bigger ... an exponentially bigger amount of money than the amount of money that would go to the New York Times, say, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: And then, you start thinking about the stuff that Politico has covered over the years, and it’s a real head scratcher, right? I mean-

Walter Kirn: Yeah, like Russiagate?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I mean, so just to bring up some of the greatest hits of Politico over the years, they were a big proponent of the ... let’s count how many people have ever watched the Russian-subtitled movie or so they had ... the Russiagate scandal, as presented in 17 graphs, that was one of my favorites. All of Trump’s Russia ties ... It’s seven charts, okay? Yeah, they were a real proponent of the sort of Starburst graphics with Putin and things coming out of his head. They had another one that was really great, I think it was called ... the original title was something like the 100 and something people connected to the Trump-Russia scandal, but now it’s 332. And so they just continually added all the connections between Trump and Russia.

And then of course, later they became famous for the Hunter Biden stories, Russian disinfo piece, that was fed to them directly by John Brennan. Actually, John Brennan’s, deputy Nick Shapiro. And this was the famous 51 spies letter that went straight to Politico. And there’s a lot of other stuff too. I mean, Politico did a lot of pretty aggressive reporting on, let’s say, vaccine critics, critics of lockdowns. I don’t know, Walter, what’s your general impression of ... I mean, because I don’t think the scam is, “All right, this is an outright front for the intelligence services.” We’re just going to do all these pieces as dictated to us by the NSA or whatever it is, but at minimum, we have to worry about our big customer, right?

Walter Kirn: Well, okay. The reason I made that prediction on Monday, that accurate prediction, was that I was in Washington two weeks before, and at one point, I was talking to an intelligence source, associated with one of the agencies, and that could be verified. It wasn’t one of the freelancers at a bar who tells you they are, and they just listed a bunch of places that were friendly to them, publications. Very friendly. So far, none of them have appeared on this list.

Matt Taibbi: That’s interesting.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, but I thought, well, when this started coming out, we’re going to start getting into media organizations. Now also, understand we haven’t finished with this process. We’ve just started it. We haven’t gotten into the Health and Human Services people. So except it does seem that a lot of that times money was coming from Health and Human Services, the New York Times money.

Matt Taibbi: Some of it.

Walter Kirn: Some of it. In any case, all we’ve got is USAID and some other things, at this point. We’re going to get more. What do I think it means? For me, it utterly discredits these publications, utterly discredits them. These are publications that ran stories that would have people believe that for $100,000 in Facebook ads, Russia-

Matt Taibbi: That’s right. I forgot about that.

Walter Kirn: Tipped our election. So they made $100,000, the benchmark, as far as I’m concerned, for corrupt practices in America. Anything below that, who knows? Anything above that can influence a presidential election according to them. So now, by their own standards, they are many times Putin, like four Pinocchios, fou Putins, 34 Putins. And so, I can’t think of anything in my recent history of scandal hunting or scandal watching that has upset me more. First of all, they’re quiet about it. Second of all-

Matt Taibbi: Here we go, Big, Bold and Unchecked, Russian Influence Operation Thrives on Facebook. So yeah, I mean, this is how they covered that $100,000 and it turned out to be less than that in the end.

Walter Kirn: On Facebook.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: Not Politico, not a place that is thought to have credibility, just some junk social media site.

Matt Taibbi: Exactly. Exactly.

Walter Kirn: So 100K into Politico is worth twice a 100K into Facebook, at least if you use the prestige and credibility multiplier. So they’re done for me. I mean just done, because I don’t feel at this point in history with all these rocks being turned over and all this sense that there has been collusion without our knowledge and by the places that sniff collusion everywhere else, I see no reason to grant grace at all, because by their own standards, they failed. And I’m supposed to think going forward that they’re not just regenerating new ways to be adjacent to power. So Politico is over for me. Other places-

Matt Taibbi: Can we back up just for one second?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: So I didn’t want to give Politico a hard time until I reached out to them, and a number of reporters did. Glenn did it. I did it-

Walter Kirn: I saw that.

Matt Taibbi: I sent them a letter, I guess it was Tuesday when you first sent me that note. And the note I sent basically said, “Look, I don’t want to irresponsibly speculate about what these numbers mean.” They look a little high, right? What’s going on here? And nothing, right? They apparently haven’t felt it’s necessary to confirm or deny this to anybody, which is in keeping with the general strategy of media scandals of the last eight, nine years, where even the mainstream media watchdogs aren’t getting answers from big companies about ... things like the 60-minute scandal. What was that piece of video last year about? So they just decided they’re not going to answer these questions, so fuck them, let’s speculate, right? If they’re not going to play ball about this-

Walter Kirn: Well, my Bill of Moral indictment goes this way. First of all, they charged Russia with subverting our elections for 100K. They made that the standard. They’ve taken more than that themselves, and they used their prestige and mastheads to do whatever, which is a much stronger impact than Facebook ever has. Number two, they are what’s .... remember, in the business of sniffing out scandal, in the business of ruining people’s lives, quite consciously in many cases, they know that when they run X story about such and such an individual, they can ruin their professional life. They can maybe ruin their personal life. So to be in the business of doing it and be less than candid yourself is, to me, an unforgivable sin. If a doctor hurt someone on purpose, it’s somehow more ... I think they’re more culpable than an individual.

And if a place that goes after corruption is going to itself, practice what easily could be thought of as corrupt journalism in the service of a pay master, then they’re done. They’re done. In every profession, there are some unforgivable sins, in grocery stores or butchers. It’s giving false weight, I suppose and in-

Matt Taibbi: We’re going to call weights and measures on them.

Walter Kirn: We’re going to go call weights and measures on them. Well, we should do that too, because I have a feeling that weights and measures has powers that we don’t usually understand.

Matt Taibbi: That’s the government posts we should ask for.

Walter Kirn: Well, watch them find out that the New York Times pays slightly less than it should for its mailed copies that they ... a contract with the post office that is set at a quarter ounce less than it should be. In any case, so I have an absolute zero tolerance policy for this, especially as a journalist who never benefited from any of this myself and never even knew that it existed, that it was possible, but mostly because these guys have been making hay out of some of the slightest and most ambiguous quote, scandals of all time in the last few years, trying to push our politics, trying to push our national decision making, and whoops, no. Move on.

All of their resources should be redistributed to the independent or whatever, honest community, but I have a sense that as this all unfolds, it’s going to be more than the list we have now, and the numbers will be more profound too.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, some of the political stuff going back is ... it’s just humorous. First of all for ... I guess the background is kind of important. Politico was founded in, I think, 2007 by a Texas-based banker. I think his name was Robert Allbritton. He was connected to a thing called Riggs Bank, but also had ties to ... he owned a bunch of ABC affiliates in the south. When it first appeared, I remember that all the reporters were excited because, “Oh, wow, this is going to be a new prestige destination for jobs.” I sat next to a couple of the political reporters on the campaign trail. I believe Jim VandeHei worked there for a little bit, didn’t he? The former Washington Post-

Walter Kirn: I’ve always loathed the magazine to be honest.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, but I remember everyone was excited about it, right? Because-

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: At the time, newspapers were struggling mainly because of the enormous cost of the old school way of distributing the product. You have to put out a physical paper, you got to own these printing presses, you got to have trucks, paper kids, all that stuff. And then somebody thought, “Wow, what if we do the same kind of operation and sprinkle it with the same kind of prestige that the Washington Post and New York Times enjoys, and we’ll hire away some of their people and we’ll do that, but we’ll just make it digital and it won’t have all of these ancillary costs, and it’ll be like a concentrated version of the Times of the Post.” So it had that reputation for a little while, but then in the Trump era, it just morphed into this thing that was so crazy.

Remember the Jonathan Chait headline, front page story in New York about how Trump was a Russian agent going back to before the village people ... The Trump-Putin cover story. So this was Politico’s take on that, was just so funny. When everyone else in journalism was kind of going like this and wondering what the deal was. And here’s their thing, what Jonathan Chait gets right about Trump and Russia ...

Walter Kirn: See, what’s so funny is that this magazine, let’s call it this website, pose as, like you say, a high quality equivalent of the big papers concentrating, especially on politics that makes this even worse. I mean, if it was a sports paper or something in USAID or whoever, it might be, NASA, I think in some cases, wasn’t it NASA buying 500 subscriptions to Politico Pro ... There was a $500,000 NASA-