Transcript - America This Week November 1, 2024: "The Celebrated New York Times Election Week Hit Job"

The New York Times teams with David Brock's Media Matters to smash records for editorial mendacity. Plus, Mark Twain's great take on fraud, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

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 feeling in the last week before the election?

Walter Kirn: I feel like they have set up some subsonic wave. I’m going to go deep. Other people have superficial conspiracy theories. Mine is that somewhere in Antarctica or the center of the earth, there is a transmitter that sends a chaos wave at different frequencies that deeply rumbles like a bad broken speaker. And it has both emotional, spiritual, and digital effects, and it’s now causing interference in all realms. I’m sensing some days that it’s specifically aimed at me.

Matt Taibbi: Dude, you got to get the foil out.

Walter Kirn: It’s like Havana syndrome, except it’s continental. Yeah, it’s Eurasia syndrome, and all of Eurasia is being made to vibrate like a cracked tuning fork.

Matt Taibbi: But it’s all for a reason. It’s another Ocean’s 13 plot device. It’s election misinformation waves, but what they’re actually doing is robbing the Fed in New York or something. You’re a screenwriter. You know this is all a diversion.

Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. After the election, we’re going to all look up and find out that Fort Knox was robbed.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right. While we were all arguing about this other thing.

Walter Kirn: Right. We’ll have a very clean election afterwards. Harris will concede to Trump, ask to be a cabinet member, he will agree, and everything will be fine, except we won’t have any gold.

Matt Taibbi: Right, because Jeremy Irons will be driving a convoy with trucks out of America. We’ll get back to the British, speaking of Jeremy Irons. But so that people know, we had to calm Walter down to do this show. He was, let’s say, in a borderline state for broadcasting because it’s been an upsetting couple of days. It’s been really, really weird. I don’t know where to start. I guess we could start with the New York Times thing. That’s going to be on everybody’s minds still, probably.

This is going to come out on a Friday, we hope. And the story came out, this is something that we heard about earlier this week, because a number of people who were the subjects of this New York Times article that was going to be written by a fellow named Nico Grant got mad about the query they received in the mail and published them ahead of time, including Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. Tucker told this person to fuck off. The gist of the article we knew ahead of time was going to be that a study was done by Media Matters of America, which is the David Brock arm. It’s basically the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the American version.

And we’ll get into its whole methodology, but this is what it does. It does reports that accuse people of misinformation and then it goes to platforms and says, “Hey, how come you haven’t taken this stuff down yet?” And what they did ahead of this election, and if we could see the piece on the New York Times, the graphic, they put a lot of work into this. It’s got the whole, “And they told two friends and so on and so on,” graphic, and it’s a video thing. And they accuse the 30 people of collectively creating 268 videos that were collectively seen by 47 million Americans, and it’s the worst thing in the world, and we have to stop it. Walter, did you read the piece when it came out on Thursday, I believe, right? Yes, on Thursday. And what did you think?

Walter Kirn: Okay, well, I did read it. It’s a very interesting piece, beginning with that graphic. Usually, uncomplimentary graphics of the human face are used in political campaigns or so on, but here they did a whole fandango where they sped it up, put them together, and made it as unattractive as possible. They look like insects caught in a hive. So you get that, and before you-

Matt Taibbi: Wait, can I interrupt? It’s got a little bit of the whole Superman, two villains trapped in the Phantom Zone effect. Remember that, when they were kicked off of Krypton and then sent hurtling through space? Anyway, sorry. Old reference.

Walter Kirn: They look like they’re trapped in bottles. There’s an insectile herky-jerkiness to their movements, and that primes your mental pump for what comes next. What they tell you in this article is that the New York Times, in concert with Media Matters, a group that they admit is ideological and-

Matt Taibbi: Oh my God.

Walter Kirn: ... so on. But they find it a group that they want to work with because it does such exhaustive research, they say.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, we got to look at that passage because it’s really an amazing passage. Let’s back up a little bit. There’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing illegal, about a political action group working with a newspaper. They put together these reports, and you go and you pitch them to people on the news and you say, “I would like you to do a story on this.” That’s not unethical per se in itself. It’s a little weird when the entire purpose of the organization is to get things deplatformed or censored, but still, they’re allowed to do it. The problem is-

Walter Kirn: Media matters is the dog, the bounty hunter, of left-wing digital assassination, okay?

Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly. And so the problem usually is that when they do these things, when they do these collaborations, and we saw behind the scenes how they work a lot in the Twitter files, when the news story comes out, they’re usually described in some term like the independent research outfit Media Matters, or the nonprofit. There was a story that came up the same day in the Washington Post working with CCDH that called them the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. They were ashamed to do that, in this case, among other things, because-

Walter Kirn: Because it’s three days before an election, and the subject of the piece is not just one or two or three, but dozens of subjects, all of whom might play a part in the election. Yeah, I think they might have to have a proviso about why they chose this at this moment.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and so they can’t quite say the non-denominational or the independent. They had too much shame, which was interesting because the Washington Post doesn’t when they do this stuff, and The Times in the past hasn’t. This time, with this article, in this circumstance, they felt compelled to point out that this is an organization that has described itself in tax forms as being about countering conservative misinformation. That’s specifically what they do. That’s their official purpose. So The Times has to mention it. So what do they say? It’s an amazing paragraph. “While Media Matters is a progressive organization that regularly criticizes conservatives, reporters and academics frequently cite as a source on YouTube misinformation because it devotes significant resources to tracking the vast platform.” Walter, what’s your take on that as an excuse for doing the piece?

Walter Kirn: So I’ve noticed with The Times and like places, credentialing anything you do before you do it is incredibly important. And they said here, “Other people use this thing, so we will.” Okay? And the reason other people, academics particularly, that high caste profession, use it because it devotes significant resources. Well, what political organization doesn’t devote significant resources to its mission? What? How does that raise them above the common lot of propaganda shops?