Transcript - America This Week, May 10, 2024: Canada Über Alles! On Justin Trudeau's Terrifying New Speech Law

Walter and Matt discuss the New York Times and Canada's Online Harms Act. Plus, "The Story-Teller," by Saki.

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going?

Walter Kirn: Good, because I’m wearing a shirt known as a Henley. See that? And that’s-

Matt Taibbi: What’s a Henley?

Walter Kirn: That’s a shirt without a collar that buttons this way. And most of my girlfriends and wives, of which there have been three, wives I mean, have asked at various times in my life that I wear a Henley more often. They think that it sort of takes the fuddy-duddy.

Matt Taibbi: Wow.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And so the other day I went and bought one, and now I’m wearing it and I feel free, open, I’m laughing for absolutely no reason. I should have done it a long time ago.

Matt Taibbi: That’s terrific.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything that you’ve ever been asked to wear by the romantic partners in your life that you’ve resisted?

Matt Taibbi: Just anything other than jeans and sweat jackets.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Really like a button-down shirt, anything. Shoes would be nice.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: I try to make these concessions from time to time, but I’m a very poor dresser. I need to be dressed.

Walter Kirn: Okay. Okay. Well, we’ll work on that. I’m going first with the Henley. There was a time about 15 years ago when you wore thermal undershirts underneath T-shirts. Remember that? And I tried to do that and it was kind of a disaster. So I haven’t taken any fashion tips since then, but I’m ready. I don’t know. It’s really improved my mood.

Matt Taibbi: That’s excellent. Well, I’ll just imagine you frolicking through a field of flowers and wheat fronds as we do this show.

This isn’t really a bad news kind of a week. There’s a little bit of darkness we’re going to get into, but there was a little flicker of something like hope that kind of happened this week. And curious to hear what your take on this is. It’s a little bit of an inside baseball media story, but once you get the basics of the plot, the ending is incredibly satisfying.

Walter, you obviously heard about Executive Editor Joe Kahn’s outbursts. This is the executive editor of the New York Times who gave an interview to Ben Smith, famous media reporter at Semafor, and he just let everybody have it all at once. And whether he means it or not, it was beautiful.

Walter, how did you feel when you heard this thing?

Walter Kirn: Well, yeah. It was like hearing the coach of your losing high school football team suddenly say, “We’re going to go back to fundamentals. It’s all about blocking, tackling and running the ball.” And in this case, the fundamentals are a somewhat adversarial relationship with the political party that’s in power at the moment, or any political party or government that might be in power. This new revelation that the speaking truth to power business actually involves sometimes saying things that they don’t want you to or haven’t already approved. And it came as so revolutionary given the last few years because there had been an almost stated policy, sadly at the time, starting around Trump time, that, I don’t know, the news had a protective promotional function for the good people of the world.

Matt Taibbi: Right. You had to be not just true, but true to history’s judgment.

Walter Kirn: Right, true to history’s judgment and just sort of doing a good thing, and boy scout helping along our democracy. Whereas the press that I loved, which is supposed to rattle people with stories they didn’t want to hear and confront them with statistics that they’ve been suppressing and so on, has been gone for so long that I thought maybe it had vanished. And to see it come back, like I say, it was like watching a migration of birds that you thought had gone extinct, come flying back in the spring. Oh my God-

Matt Taibbi: You’re in the beach and the coelacanth comes past, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. Or the geese. “The geese are back, honey. They didn’t die in South America.”

Matt Taibbi: Oh man. No, it was great on multiple levels and I want to stress out, I got excited about it. I put a headline that was like, Is Journalism Back, of course wildly overstating what this is.

What it really is, is the Biden administration has been making unreasonable demands of the New York Times for five years now. And the Times, really to its discredit, has done a lot of bending over backwards or bending over forwards depending on which image you want to use.

And there was recently a story that was leaked in Politico that was designed to kind of twist the Times one more time. And Kahn, I think he just had it. He had enough. And this interview that he gave to Smith, the thing that aroused the most anger among the press community was this incredibly simple statement, and maybe it might be even worth looking at this on the page just because it’s just so amazing that this is what they would get angry about.

He had been criticized by Dan Pfeiffer, who is a podcaster like us. He used to be the White House Communications Director under Barack Obama, I believe. Now he’s on Pod Save America. And he was complaining actually in a substack that he has that the New York Times didn’t see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian for taking power. Now, I don’t know what he was looking at at the time.

So Ben Smith is forced to ask the question, “Why don’t you see your job as we’ve got to stop Trump? What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?” And Kahn answers, “Good media is the fourth estate. It’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair open election where people can compete for votes. And the role of the news media is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or another, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.”

And then he goes on to say, “It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote, and there’s a very good chance based on our polling that he will win the election. So there are people out there in the world who may decide based on their democratic rights to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It is the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”

Water is wet. Right? I mean, the media reports and politicians compete for votes and somebody wins, and we’ve got to live with that. These are obvious things. The fact that the editor of the New York Times who is not exactly a hot-blooded shoot from the hip type of personality, if you’ve ever seen Joe Kahn speak, the fact that he had to come out and say this and then be denounced by all of these journalism professors and media critics, it was kind of amazing to watch. They just do not believe that it’s true that it’s not the New York Times’ job to get Joe Biden elected.

Walter Kirn: So I’m in Las Vegas right now, and this was like watching a casino boss burst out onto the floor where the blackjack tables are and say, “You know what? Our job is to show people a good time and win and lose money, not feed the poor.” And everybody goes, “You’re darn right.”

I mean, as valuable as our democracy is and as important it is for many to defeat Trump, it was never their job. And to see them have to assert that their job is their job versus somebody who literally was asking them to make an on the record statement that the New York Times was going to devote its many decades old business to defeating a particular presidential candidate.

Matt Taibbi: Right. What’s he supposed to say?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I mean, to change their motto, all the news that gets Trump thrown away. And it shows that the confidence of these people like Pfeiffer, that they had everybody in the bag, that they’d created an entire new world and a new mission was ultimate confidence. I mean, he was flabbergasted, I think by the response. And other people have been too. It’s amazing that it went this far.

Matt Taibbi: It didn’t really need to. This is such a self-inflicted wound on the part of the Biden administration. They were getting basically everything they wanted from the New York Times. Their real gripe goes back to 2019 when Ken Vogel, who’s a really good reporter, a really good investigative reporter, knows what he’s doing, he gets key facts about the Hunter Biden story. Doesn’t get them from Rudy Giuliani. Gets them from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office. So this $3.4 million that’s paid to Rosemont Seneca becomes part of the discussion. And yes, the New York Times contributed to that.

But the New York Times also sat out the laptop story entirely and basically squashed that, and they squashed every other Biden related controversy during the election season and after. And yet, the Biden administration was still peeved.

And so they went to the extraordinary lengths to humiliate the newspaper. Leaking this little tiny story in Semafor, leaking this tale about how they’d invited everybody in media to the first of a series of retreats in Wilmington where they would be informed about what they were doing wrong. They were shown ... Let me see what the exact language is. They were shown charts about things that they had not covered about Donald Trump. I’m sorry. They were shown a coverage spreadsheet laying out the area, the areas where the team, that’s the Biden team, believes that their reporting has fallen short.

And so all of these reporters showed up, gave off the record privileges to the White House while they laid out a plan for, here’s the stuff we think you should be covering about Donald Trump. And then they turned around and leaked to Semafor that of all the people there, the only paper that didn’t get a gold star for obedience was the Times. They were the only ones whose meetings were unproductive.

I mean, that’s just such a petty thing to do. And what are you supposed to do? At that point you’re just rubbing the puppy’s nose in it, don’t you think?

Walter Kirn: First of all, Matt, have you heard of these sort of meetings, these kind of joyous principal’s office meetings where kids actually voluntarily run to the principal’s office to find out how they can do better, being good and pleasing the teacher?

I can’t believe that those were leaked. I mean, it’s so shameful that people even went and that they agreed that they should be secret only to be rewarded with being leaked on by the people who called the shameful meeting. I mean, I’d be pissed too. Maybe they’ve just finally had enough of this behind the scenes stuff. I mean, maybe this is an outbreak of just complete frustration and postponed anger over this lapdog treatment.

Matt Taibbi: Well, yeah. And then shortly after that, the White House, well, clearly some people from the White House talked to Politico, and we’ll just show you the headline here, because it’s worth seeing.

This was a story that came out a couple of weeks ago, very well reported. I mean, this guy, Eli Stokols, got it looks like a couple of dozen sources to tell the history of this feud that had erupted between the Times and the White House. And yes, it’s a good story, but they presented as something that was petty on both sides.

Really it’s kind of a forum for the Biden administration and people surrounding the administration to just take more shots at the Times. They complain about some person who wasn’t even a White House reporter who did some run-of-the-mill story and got an attribution wrong. I don’t even think he got it wrong. I think what happened was they had a standing agreement with the White House that a White House spokesperson would not be named, and this other reporter didn’t know that and just wrote the guy’s name, because that’s what happens if you don’t say off the record or this is on background, look, everything’s fair game.

But anyway, they go in here and it’s just full of these quotes. Like here’s Kate Berner who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign. Seeing the frustration with the Times is sometimes so intense because the Times is failing at its important responsibility.

Then there’s lines like this, which are kind of amazing. “The president’s communications team’s bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets. But the frustration and obsession with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working class sense of himself-