Transcript - America This Week November , 2024: "The Insanity Era Dies. What's Next?"

The mainstream press is suffering calamitous losses after last week. What will replace it? Plus Trump's picks and Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky."

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you?

Walter Kirn: I’m a lot better than I was. The whole last week was both exhilarating, fascinating, and completely exhausting.

Matt Taibbi: I feel exactly the same. I’m ready to collapse. We’re doing this after I came in from a late night Amtrak, so I’m kind of half-awake at the moment, but feeling great, looking forward to it,

Walter Kirn: But Amtrak’s so comfortable that I’m sure you slept like a baby on the way back, right?

Matt Taibbi: Amtrak, I was just saying to our mystery producer, I’m a billion years old and I can’t, except for the addition of plugs to the seating areas, I can’t think of a single thing that’s gotten better about Amtrak since I was a little boy. It’s not really faster. There aren’t more trains. The seats aren’t more comfortable. The food isn’t better. I mean, I don’t know. Other countries have trains that get you there in 10 seconds and you...

Walter Kirn: Other countries have trains that allow you to get on in Germany and wake up in Asia somewhere.

Matt Taibbi: Right, yes.

Walter Kirn: Refreshed. If you don’t go to sleep, you make all kinds of new friends. Amtrak is a lonely experience. And even though you’re not allowed to smoke anymore, the memories of smokers are somehow imbued in the atmosphere. You can just feel the old Amtrak. I don’t think the trains have been rehabbed in any appreciable way. And the Acela, which I thought was some miracle of American futurism, is approximately three minutes faster, I think.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, the Acela sucks balls. It’s more expensive for the same product. And they force you to sit in those horrific foursome arrangements. Anyway, we’re getting off course, but I had a...

Walter Kirn: But I think Amtrak as a surrogate for the American state is a good subject. All I’ll say is that I went on it a couple of weeks ago, I went from Union Station in Washington to beautiful Penn Station in New York City, and I went to the ticket counter and she said, “Now, do you want first class or regular?” And I said, “Well, what does first class get you?” And she said, “A drink,” I think, and it was a hundred dollars more. And she said, “I actually won’t let you buy first class.” I guess I wasn’t dressed like a rich man, and she took pity on me.

Matt Taibbi: I could go on for a long time. I just had one of those days yesterday. There was a downed power line in front of the tracks, so all the Amtrak trains were stuck behind Philadelphia. Anyway, I’ve had so many misadventures on Amtrak that I could write three novels about it.

Walter Kirn: My final word on Amtrak though is that Amtrak reveals to you what the backyards of New Jersey are really like. And for that alone, I think it’s worth at least one ride.

Matt Taibbi: I’m also convinced that that’s where the producers of the wire got the idea because it runs straight through West Baltimore, right? But okay, so it’s a week after the election, a gazillion things have happened. They’re happening as we speak. The world is changing at a speed that is, I can’t recall anything like this pace in my lifetime. I mean, maybe earlier this summer when we had that succession of crazy events beginning with the assassination attempt or beginning with Biden dropping out. But now things are happening incredibly quickly and there’s consternation everywhere.

But I wanted to start off this show with a remarkable series of facts that was reported earlier this week and is a growing story and needs to be remarked upon. Dylan Byers, who is one of those used to be. I’m a guy who used to be a writer at Rolling Stone. Dylan used to be a writer at CNN. He now writes at Puck. And he wrote a piece about how the new CEO of CNN is planning hundreds of layoffs. This is going to include on-air talent. There’s going to be rethinking of some of the higher salary figures at CNN. And they’re going to reconsider apparently their entire strategy. This was coupled by a leak, I think, a little bit prematurely of some Nielsen numbers. And the New York Times finally put the story up today called Viewers Flee NBC and Flock to Fox News in Wake of Election.

Now, the Fox numbers, whatever, I think we could expect that Fox was going to keep its viewership. But primetime viewership at MSNBC has fallen 53% from October. If you go down, you’ll see The Rachel Maddow Show this past Monday had 1.3 million viewers, which is a million shy of her October average. So this coupled with some news about mass layoffs at some other papers, there are rumors about, let’s just say some of the bigger newspapers are about to take the ax to their staffs. We’ve heard-

Walter Kirn: Well, there are only two really left, so I mean maybe two and a half if you include the Los Angeles Times. So where did you hear that? Is that in that piece or is that just rumors?

Matt Taibbi: No, I mean the newspaper thing part of this is going to come out probably next week. But basically ratings have plummeted at the kind of non-conservative, non-heterodox spaces. And okay, you would expect this after an election loss, except that’s exactly what didn’t happen in 2016. What happened in 2016 is that the press rebranded itself as the resistance, right?

Walter Kirn: Right, right.

Matt Taibbi: It was democracy died in darkness. And they turned upside down the traditional pattern of news organizations losing market share after elections. Because what normally happens is news companies make money on ads, election ads during the election years, and then they kind of gut it out for the fallow seasons. But after Trump got elected the first time, they all made massive fortunes for 2017, 2018, all the way through the middle of 2019 or so until the Mueller report collapsed.

Walter Kirn: Well, exactly. They had Days of Our Mueller, the long-running soap opera to keep them going.

Matt Taibbi: Right. But they slowly rebuilt their audiences from there all the way through this election. But I don’t think they’re coming... I think this is actually the end for this incarnation of the media. We talk a lot about the quote, unquote, mainstream media on this show.

Walter Kirn: Right, right, right. Sure.

Matt Taibbi: I think that might be a past tense kind of a thing soon. We’ve already remarked upon how little influence they had on this election and...

Walter Kirn: Well, I mean, they might’ve had negative influence in the sense that the candidate that they so clearly and emphatically wanted to win didn’t. But what they did was a multi-level fail. On the one hand, they made bad predictions, which is one of the reasons people go to the media in an election season. Had they predicted anything even close to correctly, we might not be seeing it at this scale. But people realized that they were actively misled. I went back through my tweets for the election season.

Matt Taibbi: I saw that. People should look.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And nailed it at every point, and at every point I was contra the mainstream media. From reviewing the debate to thinking about Harris’s chances to the Paul Krugman-esque denial that the papers trafficked in about the economy in which they all echoed this thought that things were great and people just had a faulty perception of their own financial condition. I mean, they did everything they could really to jump off a cliff. And they all jumped off a cliff holding hands, screaming Hitler.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It was like the Thelma and Louise ending.

Walter Kirn: Right. And it got worse at the end. It was as though they could not consider the possibility of failure. When they reviewed the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden as some sort of Nazi rally and did so almost unanimously, I thought, well, this is their Thelma and Louise movement. They just sped up to, they went from 60 to 70 to 90, and here they are flying over the Grand Canyon, and gravity can’t be escaped forever. So I think you’re right. The night of the election, you wrote and said, “So many people are going to lose their jobs now.”

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, yeah. And I thought that was going to be first because executives, like CNN’s CEO, Mark Thompson, I thought people like him, there were going to be a number of figures in media who were going to say, okay, look, I’ve given these people all the rope I could. Not only did they not get the person elected, they may have actually gotten the other guy elected. And now I’m looking at losing another gazillion dollars.

Walter Kirn: And Anderson Cooper makes $20 million reportedly. He’s not the most shrill or impassioned of the propagandists, but I imagine that Rachel makes around that too. I can’t remember. It was publicized at one point.

Matt Taibbi: I thought it was higher than that, but yeah.

Walter Kirn: But they misled about everything. They misled about Biden’s state of mind. They misled about Harris’s chances. They misled about this fascist authoritarian rally and everything in between. But not only did that happen, they had not so great audiences already. In other words, they were already so far out over their skis in terms of their ability to profit from their broadcasts. And these people seem to be at that point obviously apparatchiks who were being paid because they kept the networks in good favor with the state. And what I think is happening now is not just a reflection of the market, because they were already failing in the market, they were already overpaying and overspending. What’s happening now is that they don’t have a client in the federal government anymore. In other words, there’s no one who it’s worth losing money to please.