The “consensus enforcement mechanism” of censorship on social media has not only been an attack on civil liberty but also sapped the public square of a desire to reach the truth, according to journalist Matt Taibbi.
Where there was once a hunger for freedom, there’s now a collective apathy over fighting to keep it preserved, Mr. Taibbi said.
In doing so, the will to be curious and think about issues in a complicated way has been exhausted, he said.
“It’s making us less interested in fighting for our rights.”
In his speech at “Freedom Fest” in Memphis, Tennessee, on July 14, Mr. Taibbi said that what he found unbelievable was not the government censorship but its endorsement in society at large.
“The part that didn’t compute was why so many in the general public were accepting of the situation,” Mr. Taibbi said in the speech. “This included people I knew. Many people in America are not just accepting of digital censorship; they believe it to be vitally necessary.”
The American public had formerly been known for its rebellious, fighting spirit, willing to protest government overreach, but what’s taken place over the past several years has transformed that spirit into compliance, he said.
This transformation has only been facilitated by social media, he said.
“I was one of the first people in the ’mainstream media' to worry about [internet censorship] in the States, and one of the first things I was told is that social media is addictive, the same way cigarettes are addictive,” Mr. Taibbi said. “There are studies done about how people get dopamine hits even from feeling, for instance, the waffle pattern on the back of their phones; they’re addicted to the whole process of looking at their phones.”
This addiction fuels an internet culture that’s intrinsically anti-individualistic, he said, which most prominently shows in younger people whose self-worth becomes ensnared by how much attention they’re getting on social media, leaving them to rely not on self-creation but on group approval.
Mr. Taibbi said this mindset is contrary to the American spirit.
“We Americans once cherished independence and lived off folk tales about going off on one’s own, on the open road,” he said in his speech. “Think about Ishmael, or Huck and Jim, or Chuck Berry, who picked up a guitar and sang about setting out with ‘no particular place to go,’ creating a dazzling sound that touched a nerve with the whole world.”
But that spirit has departed, Mr. Taibbi said.
“We never had to think about how we fit into a crowd as much as we do now,” he told EpochTV. “And I think internet culture wraps up everybody so much in group affirmation that it’s been very harmful.”
A Chilling Effect on Individual Thought
This herd behavior has contaminated journalism, a field that he said in the past instructed people to go in the opposite direction, ask questions, and think critically.In media today, he said, journalists are discouraged from stepping out of the narrative.
“Now, the stars of our business and mainstream media are all people who go along with the consensus view of things, and it’s very frowned upon to raise questions about things that have ‘been decided,’” he said.
This fear has spread into academia and newsrooms, Mr. Taibbi said, creating a chilling effect on the sharing of individual thought.
“That’s just a terrible atmosphere for this kind of job because you need to have that spirit of free inquiry in order to get to the truth,” Mr. Taibbi said.
Investigative reporting isn’t about garnering popularity by reinforcing a shared consensus, he said, although that’s what journalism today has become.
“Your average investigative journalist—the good ones—are difficult, prickly people who go against the grain, and they keep digging until they find what they think is the truth,” he said. “Take somebody like Seymour Hersh—that is exactly the kind of person the current system is designed to weed out—the person who doesn’t accept on its face whatever the official explanation of things is.”
Hersh reported in February an allegation that the Biden administration had sanctioned a military operation that involved destroying three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, while legacy media outlets issued the consensus that their destruction was “a mystery.”
“That’s the attitude of a real journalist,” Mr. Taibbi said. “They don’t want that person anymore, and it wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I started to see people expressing that openly in the business. Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand why that is. What’s the big change?”
Even before the internet, there was a demographic shift in journalism, Mr. Taibbi said.
“When my father started doing this job, it was more of a trade than a profession,” Mr. Taibbi said. “It was very common for people who went into journalism to be the sons and daughters of electricians or plumbers or graduates of typing schools.”
After the book “All the President’s Men” about reporting on the 1972 Watergate scandal was published in 1974 followed by a 1976 film, journalism became more appealing to the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite, Mr. Taibbi said.
“So, this created a problem, especially, I noticed, on the campaign trail, because they were the same people socially as the people they were reporting on,” Mr. Taibbi said.
Instead of being adversarial, reporters had entered into a cooperative relationship with the political players, Mr. Taibbi said.
As an example, Mr. Taibbi pointed to the 1996 book “Primary Colors,” which was first published anonymously, though it was later found to be written by columnist Joe Klein.
Mr. Klein mixed fiction and nonfiction to tell the story of former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign trail.
‘Consensus Enforcement Mechanism’
During former President Barack Obama’s administration, and later under former President Donald Trump, journalists galvanized into what Mr. Taibbi called a “consensus enforcement mechanism” resembling the Soviet, “low-rent advertisement” reporting that carried water for the factions of the Communist Party.With no evidence, American journalists took unsupported stories, such as the allegation that Trump had worked with the Russian government to get elected, and attacked anyone who questioned the narrative, Mr. Taibbi said.
“I was recognizing the same kinds of language that we saw in the [Iraq weapons of mass destruction] affair, where a lot of people were talking about anonymous sources, referring to things that could not be independently confirmed by other reporters,” Mr. Taibbi said. “Like science, if you can’t repeat the experiment in the lab, you’ve got to be a little bit nervous about it. And I thought this is a really big story to be risking so much on.”
In May, special counsel John Durham issued his final report, in which he concluded that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and that the FBI had made several “missteps” in the investigation.
When he saw journalists such as Glenn Greenwald scorned for reporting on the holes in the Russiagate story, Mr. Taibbi said he began to become convinced that it was more propaganda than truth.
“It only got worse from there,” he said.
Though seasoned journalists such as he and Mr. Greenwald can face the heat, Mr. Taibbi warned that this treatment dissuades journalists who may now be less inclined to seek real answers.
“They’re going to look at this and say, ‘If I go over there and I start saying these things, that might be the end of my career, and so, do I need that?’” Mr. Taibbi said.
It’s not the goal of journalists to tell people what to think and for whom to vote, he said, but that’s what the craft has become over the past several years.
“Our job ends when we publish the stuff,” Mr. Taibbi said. “It’s up to the reader to figure out what to do with the information.”
Because it was blinded by its own false narratives and push to steer public opinion, the press failed to see why Trump was succeeding, Mr. Taibbi said.
“And that was amazing to me because it seemed to be incredibly obvious,” he said.
Trump was giving voice to the growing frustration of those who were marginalized throughout the Obama administration, Mr. Taibbi said.
“And people had a right to be angry at that time,” he said. “America was becoming dysfunctional. We had just lived through a crippling financial crisis where the rich got completely bailed out and everybody else didn’t. There was all of this hostility out there. He captured that in a very smart way.”
However, that’s not what the media reported, Mr. Taibbi said.
What it reported instead, he said, was a litany of ad hominem attacks, calling Trump a racist and a liar while telling the American public not to vote for him.
‘Two Minutes Hate’
By using code words such as white supremacist, terrorist, fascist, and anti-vaxxer, the media class effectively silences the voice of millions of American citizens, Mr. Taibbi said.“It’s almost like the same kind of thinking that Dostoevsky was describing in ‘Crime and Punishment,’” he said. “Once you think somebody is bad enough, once you’ve convinced yourself in your mind that they’re so devoid of positive qualities that you don’t have to have normal human sympathy or compassion, then everything is permitted, right?”
News stories used these code words to demonize entire groups of Americans who don’t concede to legacy media’s narrative and called on its readers to “appropriately disdain them.”
“That’s something that was predicted by Orwell,” Mr. Taibbi said. “Why have the Two Minutes Hate? Because it’s necessary. It’s a reinforcement mechanism in a society where intellectualism is downplayed.”
In “1984,” George Orwell described the ceremony as “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,” in which members of the public expressed their hatred of their perceived enemy, which Mr. Taibbi called “an important ritual” for people who need to feel in hateful concert with others.
The Propagandizing of American Citizens
In 1948, the Smith–Mundt Act, or the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act, was passed, which prohibited intelligence agencies from propagandizing the U.S. population.“What we’ve found is that they’ve been gradually rolling back those restrictions,” Mr. Taibbi said.
Agencies such as the FBI and CIA that had been using counterterrorism disinformation methods on foreign adversaries are now turning those operations inward on U.S. citizens, Mr. Taibbi said.
“Instead of ‘Don’t join al-Qaeda,’ now they’re saying, ‘Don’t vote for Donald Trump,’ or ‘Don’t join the Canadian truckers’ protest,’ or ‘Don’t join the Yellow Vests movement,’” Mr. Taibbi said.
It’s not a right or a left plot, Mr. Taibbi said, but a larger scheme to keep people restrained within a government-ordained worldview.
‘Defining Issue of Our Time’
Numerous digital manipulations such as shadow banning and deep fakes add to the multiple ways in which the internet has been used to create a manufactured reality, Mr. Taibbi said.“Because right now, people are getting a completely skewed version of reality when they go online,” he said. “Things that are actually popular look unpopular, and things that are unpopular look popular, and that influences people in very strange ways.”
Mr. Taibbi said that it’s the defining issue of our time, around which it will be decided how much freedom people are going to have in the digital age.
“Are we going to tightly regulate the way people think? Or are we going to allow them to be free thinkers, as we did very briefly in the West?” Mr. Taibbi asked. “This is an inflection point that may turn out later to be a crucial moment in the intellectual history of the people, and I hope it comes out the right way, because I think it’s very scary.”
