Owned (Hachette, 2025), by Eoin Higgins, traces the relationship between tech industry barons and two former left-wing journalists.
Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised. Putting his Occupy Wall Street days behind him, Taibbi has fallen into the embrace of the reactionary Young America’s Foundation. He recently shared a bill with other right-wing pundits like Jordan Peterson, Eric Bolling and Lara Logan. Channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon, he frets about “bullying campus Marxism” (Substack, 6/12/20).
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who helped expose National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13; New York Times, 10/23/14), has buddied up with extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, notorious for falsely claiming that the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. That’s in addition to Greenwald’s closeness to Tucker Carlson, the ex–Fox News host who has platformed the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust revisionism.
This is just a taste of what has caused many former friends, colleagues and admirers to ask what happened to make these one-time heroes of left media sink into the online cultural crusade against the trans rights movement (Substack, 6/8/22), social media content moderation (C-SPAN, 3/9/23) and legal accountability for Donald Trump (Twitter, 4/5/23).
Both writers gave up coveted posts at established media outlets for a new and evolving mediasphere that allows individual writers to promote their work independently. Both have had columns at the self-publishing platform Substack, which relies on investment from conservative tech magnate Marc Andreessen (Reuters, 3/30/21; CJR, 4/1/21). Greenwald hosts System Update on Rumble, a conservative-friendly version of YouTube underwritten by Peter Thiel (Wall Street Journal, 5/19/21; New York Times, 12/13/24), the anti-woke crusader known for taking down Gawker.
High-tech platforms
Some wonder if their political conversion is related to their departure from traditional journalism to new, high-tech platforms for self-publishing and self-production. In Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices of the Left (2025), Eoin Higgins focuses on the machinations of the reactionary tech industry barons, who live by a Randian philosophy where they are the hard-working doers of society, while the nattering nabobs of negativism speak only for the ungrateful and undeserving masses. Higgins’ book devotes about a chapter and a half to Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, but Musk is refreshingly not the centerpiece. (Higgins has been a FAIR contributor, and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas is quoted in the book.)
The tech billionaire class’s desire to crush critical reporting and create new boss-friendly media isn’t just ideological. Higgins’ story documents how these capitalists have always wanted to create a media environment that enables them to do one thing: make as much money as possible. And what stands in their way? Liberal Democrats and their desire to regulate industry (Guardian, 6/26/24).
In Higgins’ narrative, these billionaires originally saw Greenwald as a dangerous member of the fourth estate, largely because their tech companies depended greatly on a relationship with the US security state. But as both Greenwald and Taibbi drifted rightward in their politics, these new media capitalists were able to entice them over to their side on their new platforms.
Capitalists buying and creating media outfits to influence policy is not new—think of Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post (8/5/13; Extra!, 3/14). But Higgins sees a marriage of convenience between these two former stars of the left and a set of reactionary bosses who cultivated their hatred for establishment media for the industry’s political ends.
Less ideological than material
Matt Taibbi (X, 2/15/24) learned the hard way that cozying up to Musk and “repeatedly declining to criticize” him was not enough not avoid Musk’s censorship on X.
Higgins is not suggesting that Thiel and Andreesen are handing Taibbi and Greenwald a check along with a set of right-wing talking points. Instead, Higgins has applied Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda model, which they used to explain US corporate media in Manufacturing Consent, to the new media ecosystem of the alt-right.
Higgins even shows us that the alliance between these journalists and the lords of tech is shaky, and the relationship can be damaged when these tech lords are competing with each other. For example, right-wing multibillionaire Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X. Taibbi, who boosted Musk’s takeover and the ouster of the old Twitter regime, chose to overlook the fact that Musk’s new regime, despite a promise of ushering in an era of free speech, censored a significant amount of Twitter content. Taibbi finally spoke up when Musk instituted a “blanket search ban” of Substack links, thus hurting Taibbi’s bottom line. In other words, Taibbi’s allegiance to Musk was less ideological as it was material.
Greenwald and Taibbi have created a world where they are angry at “Big Tech,” except not the tech lords on whom their careers depend.
Lured to the tech lords
Owned addresses the record of these two enigmatic journalists, and their relationship to tech bosses, in splendid detail. In what is perhaps the most interesting part, Higgins explains how these Big Tech tycoons originally distrusted Greenwald, because of his work on the Snowden case. Over time, though, their political aims began to align, forging a new quasi-partnership.
As the writer Alex Gendler (Point, 2/3/25) explained, these capitalists are “libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves.” Taibbi and Greenwald, meanwhile, became disaffected with liberalism’s social justice politics. And thus a common ground was found.
In summarizing these men’s careers, Higgins finds that early on, both exhibited anger management problems and an inflated sense of self-importance. What we learn along the way is that there has always been conflict between their commitment to journalism and their own self-obsession. We see the latter win, and lure our protagonists closer to the tech lords.
Higgins charts Greenwald’s career, from a lawyer who ducked away from his duties to argue with conservatives on Town Hall forums, to his blogging years, to his break from the Intercept, the outlet he helped create.
We see a man who has always had idiosyncratic politics, with leftism less a description of his career and more an outside branding by fans during the Snowden story. Higgins shows how Greenwald, like so many, fell into a trap at an early age of finding the soul of his journalism in online fighting, rather than working the street, a flaw that has forever warped his worldview.
Right-wing spirals
As the lawyer for a white supremacist accused by the Center for Constitutional Rights of conspiring in a shooting spree that left two dead and nine wounded, Glenn Greenwald said, “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me” (Orcinus, 5/20/19).
The book is welcome, as it comes after many left-wing journalists offered each other explanations for Taibbi and Greenwald’s right-wing spirals. Some have wondered if Greenwald simply reverted to his early days of being an attorney and errand boy for white supremacist Matt Hale (New York Times, 3/9/05; Orcinus, 5/20/19), when he used to rant against undocumented immigration because “unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate” makes “impossible the preservation of any national identity” (Unclaimed Territory, 12/3/05).
Higgins gives us both sides of Greenwald. In one heartbreaking passage, he reports that Greenwald’s late husband had even tried to hide Greenwald’s phone to wean him off social media for his own well-being.
In a less sympathetic passage, we see that of all the corporate journalists in the world, it is tech writer Taylor Lorenz who has become the object of his obsessive, explosive Twitter ire. Her first offense was running afoul of Andreessen, one of Substack’s primary financers. Her second was investigating the woman behind the anti-trans Twitter account, Libs of TikTok (Washington Post, 4/19/22).
In Taibbi, we find a hungry and aggressive writer with little ideological grounding—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it leaves one vulnerable to manipulative forces. Higgins shows us a son of a journalist who had a lot of advantages in life, and yet still feels aggrieved, largely because details of his libidinous proclivities in post-Soviet Russia made him vulnerable to the MeToo campaign (Washington Post, 12/15/17). It’s not hard to see how the sting of organized feminist retribution would inspire the surly enfant terrible to abandon a mission to afflict the comfortable and become the Joker.
Right-wing for other reasons
Naturally, Owned doesn’t tell the whole story. While Musk’s Twitter has become a right-wing vehicle (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Al Jazeera, 8/13/24; PBS, 8/13/24), a great many left and liberal writers and new outlets still find audiences on Substack. At the same time, many of the platform’s users threatened to boycott Substack (Fast Company, 12/14/23) after it was revealed how much Nazi content it promoted (Atlantic, 11/28/23). And while Substack and Rumble certainly harnessed Taibbi and Greenwald’s realignment, many other left journalists have gone right for other reasons.
Big Tech doesn’t explain why Max Blumenthal, the son of Clinton family consigliere Sidney Blumenthal, gave up his investigations of the extreme right (Democracy Now!, 9/4/09) for Covid denialism (World Socialist Web Site, 4/13/22) and a brief stint as an Assadist version of Jerry Seinfeld (Twitter, 4/16/23). Christian Parenti, a former Nation correspondent covering conflict and climate change (Grist, 7/29/11) and the son of Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, has made a similar transition (Grayzone, 3/31/22; Compact, 12/31/24), and he is notoriously offline.
Higgins’ book, nevertheless, is a cautionary tale of how reactionary tech lords are exploiting a dying media sector, where readers are hungry for content, and laid off writers are even hungrier for paid work. They are working tirelessly to remake a new media world under their auspices.
To remake the media environment
Taibbi, who once upon a time spoke at Occupy Wall Street, has lazily morphed into a puppet for oligarchic state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) to literally repost Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich.
Thiel, Andreessen and Musk have the upper hand. While X is performing poorly (Washington Post, 9/1/24) and Tesla is battered by Musk’s plummeting public reputation, Musk’s political capital has skyrocketed, to the point that media outlets are calling him a shadow president in the new Trump administration (MSNBC, 12/20/24; Al Jazeera, 12/22/24). Substack is boasting growth (Axios, 2/22/24), as is Rumble (Motley Fool, 8/13/24).
Meanwhile, 2024 was a brutal year for journalism layoffs (Politico, 2/1/24). It saw an increase in newspaper closings that “has left more than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties—or 55 million people—with just one or no local news sources where they live” (Axios, 10/24/24). A year before that, Gallup (10/19/23) found that
the 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016.
The future of the Intercept, which Greenwald helped birth, remains in doubt (Daily Beast, 4/15/24), as several of its star journalists have left to start Drop Site News (Democracy Now!, 7/9/24), which is hosted on—you guessed it—Substack.
Rather than provide an opening for more democratic media, this space is red meat for predatory capital. The lesson we should draw from Higgins’ book is that unless we build up an alternative, democratic media to fill this void, an ideologically driven cohort of rich industrialists want to monopolize the communication space, manufacturing consent for an economic order that, surprise, puts them at the top. And if Taibbi and Greenwald can find fame and fortune pumping alt-right vitriol on these platforms, many others will line up to be like them.
What Higgins implies is that Andreessen and Thiel’s quest to remake the media environment as mainstream sources flounder isn’t necessarily turning self-publishing journalists into right-wingers, but that the system rewards commentary—the more incendiary the better—rather than local journalists doing on-the-ground, public-service reporting in Anytown USA, where it’s needed the most.
Greenwald and Taibbi’s stature in the world of journalism, on the other hand, is waning as they further dig themselves into the right-wing holes, and the years pass on from their days as scoop-seeking investigative reporters. Both ended their reputations as members of the Fourth Estate in favor of endearing themselves to MAGA government.
Taibbi has lazily morphed into a puppet for state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) space to literally rerun Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich. Greenwald cheered Trump and Musk’s destructive first month in power, saying the president should be “celebrated” (System Update, 2/22/25). Neither so-called “free speech” warrior seems much concerned about the enthusiastic censorship of the current administration (GLAAD, 1/21/25; Gizmodo, 2/5/25; American Library Association, 2/14/25; ABC News, 2/14/25, Poynter, 2/18/25; FIRE, 3/4/25; EFF, 3/5/25).
Past their sell-by date
And there’s a quality to Greenwald and Taibbi that limits their shelf life, a quality that even critics like Higgins have overlooked. As opposed to other left-to-right flipping contrarians of yore, the contemporary prose of Taibbi, Greenwald and their band of wannabes is simply too pedestrian to last beyond the authors’ lifetimes.
They value quantity over quality. There is no humor, narrative, love of language or worldly curiosity in their work. And they have few interests beyond this niche political genre.
Christopher Hitchens, who broke with the left to support the “War on Terror” (The Nation, 9/26/02), could write engagingly about literature, travel and religion. Village Voice civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose politics flew all over the spectrum, had a whole other career covering jazz. This made them not only digestible writers for readers who might disagree with them, but also extended their relevance in the literary profession.
By contrast, Taibbi’s attempts to write about the greatness of Thanksgiving (Substack, 11/25/21) and how much he liked the new Top Gun movie (Substack, 8/3/22) feel like perfunctory exercises in convincing readers that he’s a warm-blooded mammal. A Greenwaldian inquiry into art or music sounds as useful as sex advice from the pope. This tunnel vision increased their usefulness to the moguls of the right-wing media evolution–for a while.
Taibbi and Greenwald are not the true enemy of Owned; they are fun for journalists to criticize, but have slid off into the margins, as neither has published a meaningful investigation in years. The good news is that for every Greenwald or Taibbi, there’s a Tana Ganeva, Maximillian Alvarez, Talia Jane, George Joseph, Michelle Chen or A.C. Thompson in the trenches, doing real, necessary reporting.
What is truly more urgent is the fact that a dangerous media class is taking advantage of this media vacuum, at the expense of regular people.
This article doesn’t post properly on fb. Your other ones do.
As someone who has followed Greenwald since he wrote for Salon, I can say that I have noticed his shift to the right on immigration. It isn’t too different from that of Jimmy Dore. That being said, there is a paradigm shift going on in politics right now. The Democrats are gung-ho for war with Russia and Greenwald, Dore, and Taibbi all disagree with this policy as it could lead to WWIII. Also, Democrats have grown really fond of censorship recently. Both Greenwald and Taibbi are free speech absolutists which puts them at odds with anyone who wants to censor or control the narrative. All three of the above-mentioned people are at complete odds with the Republicans and Democrats over the genocide in Gaza.
I can’t recall disagreeing with FAIR as much as on this article — I agree with Ezra.
Listening to Greenwald’s most recent video, denouncing both ICE’s kidnapping of the pro-Palestinian Columbia protester and European NATO gearing up for wasteful and dangerous military spending at the cost of social programs, I can’t see how you can call him a right-winger. His libertarianism may be limiting, but let’s acknowledge that to the extent his anti-authoritarianism is anti-imperialist, he’s playing a progressive and even sane role.
It’s not right-wing to see the administration’s attacks on USAID and NED, etc. as helpful to countries that face U.S. regime-change campaigns, even if Rubio remains as fanatically dedicated to subverting Cuba and Venezuela as ever.
Social media has a magnanimous cult aspect to it where you are basically traumatized every day into fighting off hordes of comments that can come from every level, who are attacking your virtual space and basically writing graffiti on your house. Then you combine that with despair about politics you have almost no sense of control over, and the deliciousness of punching left, of being cruder than the humble types sets in.
The big elephant in the room is what the overall media overload does to someone’s brain.
In a country with free speech, where every man is a king, you can supposedly piss people off and not apologize the next day for fear of upsetting a party or religious dogma.
But this also comes with a need for what’s called social discounting. If nobody is felt to be trying to tell you the truth in some kind of context, then you are constantly looking for ways to write off entire swaths of information. For Taibbi, that was women and Anti-Feminism. For. Greenwald, that was the humanists and progressives pleading for compassion to overcome the stock market he saw every day overrun them.
I don’t see the anti-trans zealots, and anti-immigrant opportunists servicing only needs for online fighting. The online fighting is a symptom of the overwhelming overproduction of opinions, which the American model tells us is for our own good. And so what we’re seeing is this new hyper individualism meeting sellouts become a model, and Money and audience chasing much like the success of Zionism after Kissinger only reinforced this cult identity. They got over the “Vietnam syndrome” of seeing war as real by starting new wars with more powerful heroes and more sure victories, fighting colonial cutout armies that were mostly designed to control their own populations.
Once a movement becomes too utopian, and the internet was really a utopianist idea, it devolves into “mere words” then it loses its teeth.
It is truly heartbreaking to see this all happen to people who you could tune into and hope to see fight the good fight, but if we’re being serious about how this false consciousness is coming about we can’t just succumb to pleasant ad hominems that neatly continue the social discounting going the other way. It should be obvious by now the incel and maga cults draw on this and reflect their own attempts to define normativity in a self serving hyperrreal way. But the reactionary side isnt getting enough traction with the left to stay there.
Look at the Black Panthers back when they were hardcore Maoists. Oppressor and oppressed. They had a very clear message. Now that’s been diluted to polling baytles
An example of this in history would be to compare Socrates to the Chinese philosopher-activist Mozi.
Mozi had an organization for his own protection, he had sophisticated communication strategy for resolving the warring states period. His reputation was supported by not just ideology but real physical and in the flesh protection.
Socrates was a full on idealist. He obeyed his inner voice, his daemon. And when the politics came for him, he faced the government, supposedly a democracy, alone. He refused attempts to flee to safety and martyred himself.
Today I see people try to join causes they think are important but their willpower and clout are really defined for them. It’s been totally normalized that your activism isn’t supposed to have immediate results, it’s supposed to have zero self interest, and the best case scenario is people feel sorry for you getting beaten up by authority.
It’s not surprising that sympathy strikes being illegal in the US so effectively squashed mass strikes. Along with Suburbia and evening TV marketing, the public has been increasingly atomized and given up their willpower to a system they can barely see operating at all. So rather then trust their own willpower, they distrust it in others. You took out too much student debt, you ate too much, you are on your phone too much, your company employees are on food stamps. The choice is not given to people as your own organizing or the status quo, but to choose how to interpret the status quo. When do you tune in or tune out? Who are you discounting and pissing off, not what you’re doing for yourself. That’s not really a change. It’s still spectator sports.
Well Ari, as a independent left. radical journalist and author since 1979. when I quit my last job as a salaried reporter, I have never taken money from anyone except for the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Fund for Constitutional Government, I switched the collectively run news site ThisCantBeaHappening.net to the Substack site you smeared by suggesting that it is finded by suspect tech money. Actually, it is a great way for indi writers like myself who cannot fined places to publish much of what I write, and one can only get so many articles published in the Nation as a freelancer, so to try and make a living with no compromises, I turned to Substack, and am just. starting after a year to start earning some money from subscribers. I think you did a disservice us genuinely independent leftist journalists by smearing Substack and by inference those of us who use it. I appreciate your calling out Taibe and Greenwald who do appear to have been bought, but how about people like me and Sy Hersh who also publishes on Substack? Are we supposed to write for free for Counterpunch and Common Dreams in order to be considered legitimate left journalists by you? My only
funding is my monthly Social Security check and the occasional $250 I can earn from a piece in FAIR , along with the still small amount get from my Substack site.
If I send someone a link to your writing, and someone replies with a Nazi link from the same website, they might think that those opinions should have equal weight.
If a capitalist business being criticized causes you to come out of the woodwork, are you really advocating just for yourself or also for him?
Being on state assistance isn’t an excuse to have no political strategy. They need consumers. If Ari’s article pushed you to defend your complacency with your pro nazi platform, and undermines robotic thinking then seems to me that’s the left movement.
This ia the lamest and most illogical piece of criticism I’ve read in years. I writ artricles in the Nation, an important magazine. A long-time friend who is a hard-core Marxist and an absolutist on some issues, asked how i could write for a publication headed by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who he considers a sell-out liberal. But Katrina, whose positions I haven’t always agreed with, published one of the best and most important articles of my 54 years in journalism, exposing decades of epic and ongoing fraud by the Pentagon, which won me a 2019 Izzy Award. The critic, who doesn’t have the courage to name herself, is saying i should not have published that piece in katrina’s magazine because some of its articles are perhaps to liberal and no sufficiently anti capitalist. That is just stupid. Both Marx and Trotsky wrote articles for capitalist publications becausee it was a way to reach people. My standard (and I’ve quit jobs based upon it, is not to allow my work to be cut or altered for political reasons. If my truth is allowed to be published I don’t care where it is published. In fact when a I learned that a number of the people involved in the secret illegal removal and transfer of a nuclear warhead mounted on a long-range cruise missile was loaded under the wing of a B-52 bomber at Minot ND during the Bush administration and against all pentagon rules was flown to Shreveport before it was noticed bya ground crew, had died under mysterious circumstances such as “suicides” and being run off the road, etc. I could not find left publication — none!– to run it. They feared being accused of conspiracy theorists. But Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine read my well researched and documented article and ran it in the magazine’s next issue, without changing or cutting a word. Should NOT have run one of my articles because I disagree with almost everything Buchanan stands for? And by they way, I have twice been put on the FBI’s terrorist watch list as a punishment for my writing, the last time being for my Nation cover story on the Pentagon’s decades of epic budget fraud. That lasted two years, and required me to be a perfect driver because the list is available to every cop with a computer in his/her vehicle, which could make any police stop into a serious encounter if the cop were to run a make on me.
Try not to have a heart attack remembering how much you’re Batman, jeez.
sorry for the idiotic comments; don’t feed the trolls.
I Love Lucy!
It’s great to do the reporting you do on serious matters, but the left should be strong enough to do this in a way that doesn’t ask people to be so self sacrificing.
In all due respect youre showing everyone how taking all the world’s problems on your back alone turns out. You’re financially compromised, your brand belongs to reactionaries, and clearly close to burning out.
Try putting yourself in your audience’s shoes.
Can they duplicate your actions? I’m not trying to say you’re not brave, but asking how many people are you taking with you?
I can try to rip apart wire around a concentration camp with my hands but if I’m caught doing that, and it’s patched up the next day and nobody got out, why would anyone follow my example, the scars on my hands would be a story to tell sure, but they would not be a method that can be widely reproduced by average people.
And if you aren’t bringing average people with you, then what are you doing but hiding and being satisfied with how much someone succeded in sidelining you?
Devastating for me to read this smear piece in FAIR. There are legitimate criticisms of both Taibbi and Greenwald, to be sure. But this isn’t that. The author gives himself away by referring to Max Blumenthal as “Assadist” and “COVID denier.” There is a whole pseudo-“left” industry that has provided cover for Russiagate propaganda and censorship coordinated by the National Security Establishment (masked as “content moderation”). They have played the “humanitarian” useful idiots in providing “leftist” cover for the destruction of Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. They have smeared those who sought the truth about such issues, calling them dupes or right-wingers.
I despair that Trump is our President. I’m no fan of Tucker Carlson. But guess what? Carlson was right about Russiagate, Syria, and Ukraine. If he is the only platform where critics on the left can appear, while Democracy Now is spewing propaganda, do they decline? Same question with platforms funded by tech billionaires. Yes Trump is bad, but he’s just a performer in the Blue Team vs. Red Team Kayfabe. And yes there is a danger of co-optation by the Tech Owner/Overlords who might like what you say about the Blues. But Paul is not writing about that; he’s attacking some of the few journalists who were actually exposing some of the Blue Team bulls**t. In doing so he is either ignorant or a witting Establishment asset. Please, please, don’t do this to FAIR. There are so few sources of journalistic integrity left.
Thanks, excellent comment!
Even FAIR and Ari Paul have major blind-spots re issues and events of global and existential importance. Full-spectrum ‘deep seeking’ research+scepticism is key.
Indeed, that’s the problem. The issues Paul, and the book by Higgins, get wrong *are* of existential importance. But rather than debate the issues directly, they dismiss the messengers with common smear tactics – guilt by association, ridicule, and outright lies (“Neither so-called “free speech” warrior seems much concerned about the enthusiastic censorship of the current administration” – read the recent posts of both Taibbi and Greenwald). Taibbi is belittled more, perhaps, because he was once a best-selling liberal darling criticizing the acceptable targets.
The US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine could threaten WWIII – but since *Trump* said that and Tucker Carlson agrees, then that must make me a “Putin puppet” and a right-winger. The current slaughter in Syria is the very predicable aftermath of the “regime change” war supported by the US. and its allies – including Israel. But pointing this out 8 or 10 years ago makes me, or Gabbard – or *Trump* – “Assadists.” If you are blackballed from all liberal and “leftist” media for such views, when you appear on Carlson or a platform funded by libertarian tech billionaires, well then that *proves* you are a right-wing dupe in bed with the fascists!
Responding to everything wrong with this piece would take in article itself. So I’ll just repeat the plea from my earlier comment below: FAIR – please wake up.
Thanks for the comment, I agree!
Thanks for this review of Higgins’ book, which I would not otherwise have seen. By the way, I have just now been re-reading a book by David Cay Johnston — a Pulitzer prize winning journalist that every true left winger should read, “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and stick you with bill)”.
If you have not seen this, I ask you to review it… because it is chock full of ammunition to persuade the 90 per cent that they should oppose the Republicans movement to convert public utilities into private moneymaking ventures. Especially see chapter 22 that describes how your health insurance premiums have risen because of grifters who succeeded in converting non-profit health insurance companies into for profit businesses and in the process greatly enriching themselves.
I started a review myself for publication on Daily Kos, but I am 81 years of age and just don’t have enough energy to do a decent job.
Thanks also for your other articles on FAIR.
This article has the bad smell of a hatchet job. Talking about Taibbi’s libidinous proclivities sounds like a catty smear not criticism etc. In this age where even the ACLU! is no longer absolutist about free speech Greenwald and Taibbi are very welcome. They were always mavericks and may have been trying to find what is good in Trump’s actions. (Even so-called progressives like AOC called for censorship!) In any case by now they must be a lot more alarmed by what Donald is up to.
This publication has steadily omitted what both Trump and Biden are really going after – keeping the $$ rolling in despite the growing objection of Americans and many others to being used as tools for profit. Why?
The last FAIR commentary I will read for now, before I unsubscribe from the newsletter. A clueless piece about what makes journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi tick. And the ultimate in short-sighted litmus tests. If you want to be left, never support someone on the right. I would say a longer-sighted litmus test would be if you want to get at the real world, support those who get closer to it on the given issue, whatever they say about other issues. I didn’t know till today how reflexively tribal FAIR could be.
And I note an irony: I had clicked on the link because the theme is dear to my heart, and I looked forward to someone addressing it: why the left has collapsed under the current tests. But we mean different things, obviously. I mean, the failures to recognize US/EU/NATO propaganda on the reasons for the Ukraine war, the US/EU (and NATO) propaganda on chemical weapons in Syria, and the genocide in Gaza. I also mean good method (I’d like to think good method is one of the things that leads one left): respect the difficulties in arriving at what we can “know,” put your ideological pre-commitments and your ego on hold, and follow the evidence. Ari Paul’s left looks smug to me, and in his case, and Higgins too as he reports Higgins, angry (a nasty anger, willing to use glib logical tricks and to do verbal violence).
I also note that for whatever reason, my efforts to post the above comment in reply to the article onsite, failed yesterday. I received a notice that Spam had been detected. Not a good look.
Many of the commenters here brought up an important point: the weaponization of identitarian issues like LGBTQ rights and feminism. Remember the woman-hating “Bernie Bros?” Both Greenwald and Taibbi have been at the vanguard of such criticisms.
Has FAIR been absorbed by the MSDNC blob? The FAIR that helped instill in me such a healthy distrust of western news media back in the 1990s is now celebrating the writings of the man who brought us Bellingcat?? Matt and Glenn are still well grounded. Ari Paul might want to check his own footing.
You’re thinking of Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat. The author being reviewed here is Eoin Higgins. Two completely different people.
Yet the article does cite Eliot Higgins. When it’s smearing Max Blumenthal as an Assadist Jerry Seinfeld it links to a Tweet by Eliot, who posted a video of Blumenthal’s standup and compares it to a war crime video. Shitty article all around!
Yet the article does cite Eliot Higgins. When it’s smearing Max Blumenthal as an Assadist Jerry Seinfeld it links to a Tweet by Eliot, who posted a video of Blumenthal’s standup and compares it to a war crime video. Shitty article all around!!
In my opinion a disappointing and biased attack on two of the better independent minded journalists today. Not saying they don’t each have their share of failings but in comparison with what else is around they are among the best I’m seeing
He uses plenty of unneeded and superfluous adjectives to convey his opinion, a practice that has come increasingly into vogue in so much of the media.
I don’t have the time or resources right now to properly write a good and intelligent comment. I’ll just say – in my opinion – much of the “left” in the US has become rotten and delusional, and it’s smart to listen to a wide range of opinions. Tucker Carlson is actually right sometimes! Right and Left don’t really mean what they used to. The Left – as it’s defined in the US today – has decided censorship of the wrong ideas is a good thing!
FAIR is increasingly pushing the rotten and delusional parts of what’s called the Left today and it’s disappointing to me. I’ll keep reading it but skepticism is warranted. It’s like reading the NYT – some of the news with propaganda and bias added.
As a FAIR reader since ’86 I have to say I can’t recall ever reading such an ill-supported hit piece as Ari Paul’s 2600 words here. Paul even squeezed in there a little bonus slap against other fellow-traveling supposedly sold-out lefties, Christian Parenti and Max Blumenthal, both hilariously dismissed in just a couple sentences. FAIR contributors have been consistently good over the decades when it comes to sourcing, citations, and comparative media analysis, yet Paul neglected to remove his own blinders in this piece (what these sellouts are selling can only be interpreted this way!), and thus he can only see the (lame) citations he’s cherry picked. Some of the problems may be Paul’s source material – the book discussed here. But he doesn’t adequately support his thesis, not even close. Have Greenwald and Taibbi evolved? Lord yes. They also write some silly crap sometimes and there seems to be some questionable pandering to audiences happening at times. But Greenwald didn’t celebrate the Trump presidency in the link Paul provided above, he celebrated the potential for the Trump presidency to “disrupt the status quo.” Truly lame gaslighting of his readers in so much of this argument. This piece displays a remarkable ignorance of their work, both past and contemporary, which contradicts his ‘bought or sold-out’ thesis. Someone should send this to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. They’re sure to have a staffer who can pick this apart and set Paul straight after removing whatever political/ideological filters they’re wearing so they can stick with the comparative analysis.
Excellent comment, but I have NEVER known Glenn to “pander” to his audience, he routinely offends the partisans in his audience. In Brazil he supported Lula, but ferociously attacks the dictatorial Lula supporting judge.
You’re right – poor choice of wording on my part as ‘pandering’ doesn’t quite work, though I was primarily thinking of Taibbi when I wrote it. There’s a significant percentage of commenters on the subject of supposed left wingers like Taibbi and Greenwald becoming right wingers, who have viewed ANY appearance by a purportedly righteous lefty in a social, political, and/or media forum or situation that directly or indirectly features right wing crazies like Alex Jones, as evidence of their being either bought by the right or having bought into right wing whatever. So Greenwald moderating an event featuring Jones must mean, as Paul states, he “buddied up” to Jones. And every appearance by either these guys with Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson, or certainly ANY appearance on Fox automatically became evidence of their having sold out or bought the right wing vibe.
This is the logical fallacy, the false dichotomy, that Ari Paul presents here as the only two possible explanations of Taibbi/Glenn’s supposed devolution. Too bad Paul excludes an abundance of evidence at Taibbi’s The Racket and Greenwald’s System Update that completely contradicts his rightward-bought or rightward drift theme. These guys are prolific, yet Ari Paul does not analyze or compare their work over some given period of time here to support this piece. This is understandable because a deeper reading of their work does not support his false dichotomy.
Also unfortunate that Paul didn’t recognize or analyze why these two began appearing and publishing outside the mainstream in the first place – the complete lack of access in the corporate press to critical comment and analysis of the Vlad-is-Trump’s-Puppetmaster Russiagate nonsense, circa 2016 and onward. If Uncle Sam’s Benevolent Empire had a functioning Fourth Estate that held the powerful to account, Taibbi and Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Patrick Lawrence and, yes, Max Blumenthal and others would have been all over the nightly news calling bullshit and would have saved us from the consequences of turning Trump into a martyr, persecuted by powerful agencies and much of the corporate press. There was no space anywhere in the mainstream for thoughtful, critical coverage of perhaps the greatest manufactured hoax in modern history, much less media accountability for years of inaccurate reporting. In The Nation magazine, The Intercept and beyond, all the way back to early 2016, critiques of mainstream press coverage were slammed by well meaning liberals as Putin/Trump loving idiocy. That was the starting point of the current craziness amongst even lefty critics of the press here at FAIR, an illogical, heavily blindered approach to press criticism which, remarkably for this fine org and writer, appear to have no idea the blinders exist.
By the way, the 3 year old NYMag post above Paul uses to supposedly illustrate Greenwald “buddied up” to Alex Jones describes Greenwald, accurately, I would argue with abundant evidentiary support, as “a hard-core free-speech advocate with a reflexive suspicion of American power.”
The first paragraph of this piece should be enough warning for any reader to raise their hand to ask a question and view the remaining text skeptically. I think it’s quite shameful and out of character for either Paul or FAIR to write a piece of supposed critical media analysis that begins with accusations represented by verbs like “aligned with” Ted Cruz, “embraced” by (i.e. won an award from) a right wing foundation, “shared a bill” with wealthy right wingers (oh my!) etc. How is it that Taibbi was “once populist” but is not now? Paul doesn’t revisit that first throwaway line, much less support the before and after assertion.
Paul’s assertion that the Greenwald critique of Taylor Lorenz’s work was simply about her “running afoul of Andreessen” or her investigation of the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account, displays a significant ignorance of his writing on the subject. Paul is either willfully ignorant of Greenwald’s work on Lorenz – difficult to believe since GG wrote voluminously about her “journalism”, or….what? He simply does not address Greenwald’s actual argument here and assumes readers won’t ask questions about his conclusions.
Curious if anyone reading this piece is thereafter interested in reading the book. This lame smear does not inspire me to check it out though I remain curious about one thing. Paul name drops the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model from Manufacturing Consent, suggesting the book author utilized that model in his book, yet he never ever discusses, how, in what manner, Higgins uses the model and/or whether it applied or did not.
This piece merits a paragraph by paragraph deconstruction and going back to the drawing board. As it is, Ari Paul presents a false dichotomy to choose from and adequately supports neither.
Any more clangers like this and it’ll probably be time to take it as a sign that the Democracy Now-like descent into flaccid, non-threatening liberalism is underway, and to step up looking elsewhere for serious media analysis.
This piece is regrettable. Its bandwagon thesis lately has been making the rounds among a certain liberal commentariat based entirely on repetition and assuredness of its assertions, which in turn are based on tendentious distortions of the two targets’ positions and presumptuously negative conclusions about them, e.g. there is something self-evidently the matter with being against “content moderation”. When I got to the part about Taibbi and Greenwald being passe, all I could do was shake my head in amusement. There are critiques to be made of these two writers (Taibbi, for example, avoids discussing Israel even as it is a clear and present danger to the First Amendment), but it is not that they are wholly owned, or that they are right-wing. This in extremis position discredits the writers who propound it. As it stands, articles like these are only a sign of the current state of liberalism. It’s embarrassing that this tripe appeared in FAIR.
FAIR used to go after Democrats and Republicans alike, calling out hawks and capitalist hacks in corporate media wherever they are. They’ve chosen the Democratic Party line far too often in recent years.
In this article, Ari Paul barely cites any actual examples of right-wing positions Greenwald and Taibbi argue. Instead, the article frames them as being associated with right-wing figures- like appearing on shows or being on platforms right-wing figures are on.
FAIR was largely silent on corporate control of speech when it came to social media platforms silencing speech (“content moderation”)- when it came to COVID speech restrictions and alleged Russian talking points, like the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression. They’ve also been largely silent on the major Democratic obsession/conspiracy theory since 2016: Russiagate. Naturally, they also haven’t said much on corporate media promoting the Ukraine proxy war.
Greenwald and Taibbi have both written about these topics, which FAIR barely covered. Since 10/7/23 Greenwald has also been focusing on the US role in Gaza and corporate media coverage- hardly a right wing position.
For whatever reason, this article also briefly attacks Max Blumenthal. His publication, The Grayzone, reports on US empire and challenging dominant narratives on US foreign policy. It’s solidlg anti-imperialism and antiwar. He was critical of parts of the COVID response, but that’s not the dominant theme of his work. He mainly reports on Gaza.
The left has been divided on Russiagate, the Ukraine war, big tech limiting speech, and identity politics. Rather than address these issues, FAIR villainizes the biggest figures opposing the Democratic Party line and calls them right-wingers.
Yeah they totally lost me on Blumenthal. And the cherry on top is citing freaking Bellingcrap of all people to smear him. I wonder if Ari realizes just how ironic and pathetic that choice was.
I will add that I’m flattered that the IDF Unit 8200 cybercommandos are still addicted to using my handle (see above from March 14) – I must have really made one of those houknoses really mad. LOL
Wow. I would say this is a NEW low for FAIR, but I never considered any of your previous work to be “low.”
I challenge you to criticize anything Greenwald or Blumenthal have ever said on the MERITS of each specific statement or article.
Maybe this is just an attempt to stoke a flame war and drive traffic, but as a previous donor to FAIR (and I’ve gone to some of your concert benefits) this is pathetic. Taibbi, yeah I can see why the left would be disgusted with him (only he did recently come out against the kidnapping of the Palestinian student and green card holder at Columbia, despite his rabid right wing Hasbara Zionist commentariat at Substack). But Blumenthal? And you cite Eliot “Bellingcat” Higgins?!?!?!
Ari do you even know who THAT Higgins is?! “Assadist”? Really?! This has me reconsidering ever donating to FAIR.org again.
Excessive partisanship and the blinders that come with it is a major plague on our system. It isn’t just because it is devisive, but perhaps more importantly it prevents us from respectful dialogue and learning from those in other camps.
The events of the last decade have convinced me that no side has a corner on truth or on dangerously harmful blind spots. Dennis Kucinich summed up the problem very concisely in an interview in 2021 when he said “. . . partisanship does violence cognition.”
In my opinion Matt Taibbi and especially Glenn Greenwald are at the top of a far too rare and much needed class of journalist who put high principles ahead of tribal loyalties.
I once thought very highly of FAIR and was a charter subscriber, but the partisan blinders they have displayed have led me to ignore their output for some years. A friend brought this piece to my attention and I see that FAIR has deteriorated far more than I realized. Publishing this ugly hit piece does far more to destroy FAIR’s reputation than it does to tarnish Matt and Glenn, IMO.
Anyone who doubts that Glenn stands on principle should just check out his System Update episodes this week. When called for, as it is now, he is attacking the Trump team ferociously for their attacks on free speech.
I agree with Glenn that free speech is absolutely critical to a healthy democratic representative government. To the degree we loose one we will loose the other.
For those with a continuing interest in this subject, which will not be going away anytime soon, here is Accuracy in Media’s March 31 press release about the Higgins book featured in the piece above. Note that Higgins views his book about Greenwald & Taibbi as an attempt “to critique them from the left”, yet as with Ari Paul’s name dropping Manufacturing Consent above, there is nothing added to illuminate whether Higgins’ supposed critique from the left is both valid and useful, or whether the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model proves useful re: describing the evolution of these two journalists. Since Paul provided no info and didn’t come close to supporting his ‘bought or bought into’ false dichotomy it’s difficult to know anything about Higgins’ supposed leftist perspective without reading the book. But it’s worth noting that Higgins has been unsuccessfully attempting to paint a portrait of Greenwald as a Tucker Carlson stooge for many years now, writing in numerous outlets.
Higgins states that “Greenwald and Taibbi have pitched themselves to the right. They have taken a really clear move to the right, and locked in with industry interests, with the same people whose money is funding their careers.”
I would absolutely agree with the first sentence but he lost me with the following one, about their “really clear move to the right”. Seems to me if that were the case, and a talented writer like Ari Paul had read a book successfully making that case, he could/would have written a far better piece than the above. Would be nice to read an actual critical review of the book by a writer who is aware of his/her own ideological filters.
https://accuracy.org/release/how-tech-billionaires-on-the-right-bought-the-loudest-voices-on-the-left/