Broken Brains

What Mehdi Hasan’s embarrassing exchange with Matt Taibbi reveals about the corporate press

Steve Krakauer

Apr 12, 2023

Dateline: The day Trump talked with Tucker in his first post-arrest interview

Watching this week…

— Mehdi Hasan’s journalistic devolution

— Press still covering for Rebekah Jones

— RFK run sparks media panic

— Succession, San Fran, Pentagon Docs

— Great Moments in Nord Stream Disinterest Journalism

Broken Brains: What Mehdi Hasan’s embarrassing exchange with Matt Taibbi reveals

It was September 4, 2015, and Mehdi Hasan was interviewing Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg .It was a huge get — two of the most consequential whistleblowers, together. That booking kicked off Hasan’s career as host of “UpFront” for Al-Jazeera English, and it was a substantive exchange. Hasan had several like this as host of that show for a couple years. He pressed Michael Flynn hard, and he did the same with Ben Rhodes, for example.

Hasan would then go on to work for The Intercept, the publication co-founded by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald was his editor there, for a time. It feels like a decade ago, but Greenwald only left The Intercept in late 2020.

The Intercept was a publication that would go after power and corruption, wherever it saw it. In the run-up to the 2020 primary, I think it’s fair to say it was loosely in the Bernie Sanders camp. The publication didn’t try to hide its political leanings. It leaned left — and in the progressive variety. Hasan’s work there was notable. “Joe Biden is Hillary Clinton 2.0 — Democrats Would Be Mad To Nominate Him” was the headline to a column he wrote in March 2019. “Forget the Gaffes, What About Biden’s Lies?” was one of his video essays from March 2020, in which he’d go on to outright question Biden’s mental fitness.

It wasn’t just attacks on Biden though — there were moments of praise for President Donald Trump too. “On Afghanistan, Three Words I Never Thought I’d Write: Bravo Donald Trump” was a column around that same 2020 timeframe in the pre-pandemic universe.

He was interesting. Surprising. Intellectually honest, in some ways.

But something happened to Mehdi Hasan. It’s not personal — in fact, it happened to a lot of people in the corporate press over the past five to seven years. Somewhere along the way, whether thanks to Donald Trump, or COVID, or simply the incentive structure in our new media environment, their brains broke. They changed in real, tangible, unfortunate ways. This newsletter is dedicated to the broken brains in the press.

Take some time to watch Matt Taibbi, the excellent journalist who was a darling of the left when he was exposing corruption in the GOP or on Wall Street while a reporter at Rolling Stone and has now become their nemesis since he turned his sights onto the censorship regime through the Twitter Files, appear on Hasan’s streaming show on NBC’s Peacock network from last week. It’s 25-minutes of Hasan revealing just how little he’s retained from his previous journalistic incarnations. Click the screenshot to watch the full interview:

Are the Twitter Files just “Elon Musk’s score-settling,” asks the chyron? Spoiler alert: Hasan attempts to make the case that it is. You can feel the total incuriosity oozing from every inch of Hasan’s being while interviewing Taibbi. The Twitter Files rollout was clunky. But it absolutely exposed the breadth of cooperation between government entities and a tech platform when it came to censorship and suppression. Taibbi stumbles at times, to be sure. But Hasan focuses on a few minor errors he found in Taibbi’s reporting, and uses it to invalidate the entire endeavor. It’s embarrassing obfuscation.

Never mind that Hasan was fact-checked by his former The Intercept colleague Lee Fang on the key mic drop moment he had about CISA, and proven to be wrong. Read more from Fang in his lengthy report today on all the ways Hasan misled his audience in the exchange. In the end, there appears to be just one error — a mix-up with a single date. (Taibbi also would go on to later fact-check Hasan on his Substack as well — although I wish he did it more forcefully in real-time.)

So what’s really behind this? What causes Hasan’s brain to break in such an obvious way? We need to acknowledge the incentive mechanisms surrounding our corporate press today. Hasan’s interview with Taibbi was a victory in style over substance, but the lack of substance didn’t stop his fans from boosting his cause — like this fact-free MSNBC tweet:

“Holy moly. Mehdi just cooks him alive here,” claims his disinfo dude colleague Ben Collins. Or this from HuffPost Senior Editor Andy Campbell: “I don’t think many people understand that these revelations would be a career-ender for most working journalists.”

He’s talking about the revelations…that have now been proven false. Surely the adoration on social media — the followers, the RTs — it all feels good. I’d imagine Mehdi Hasan would like to host a weekday show on actual MSNBC, rather than the little-watched streaming network, or move out of the weekend night line-up. Being bombastic and attacking the “unacceptable” people in society is a path to grow your brand. Being nuanced and intellectually honest is not generally a great formula for cable news promotions.

But there’s something else, and it’s specific to The Twitter Files — it gets at the total disinterest by those with broken brains that make up corporate press newsrooms. The censorship revealed generally is targeting people already deemed by the elite consensus to be worthy of censorship. Critics of power don’t mind it now if it’s aimed in a certain direction — the direction that hold unacceptable ideas and deserve the deplatforming, for the good of our democracy. These anti-speech activists are now a part of our media.

It is in this environment Mehdi Hasan can write a book called “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking,” when he has not persuaded a single person outside of his own choir-preaching nonsense in years. As sad as it may be to admit, there’s clearly a broken brain market out there.

Media continues spinning for Rebekah Jones, despite obvious reasons to stop

Rebekah Jones is an ancillary #Resistance figure out of Florida, whose clashes with Gov. Ron DeSantis during COVID brought her a level of protection from a media that should really have learned by now that she’s rarely truthful about anything.

Her claims have been meticulously picked apart time and time again by people like Charles C.W. Cooke, but for some reason she remains a darling of the press in the way Michael Avenatti was — until he was literally in jail. There are these characters that the already-broken-brained media just attach onto. They attack the “right” people — and they do so compellingly. Jones is no longer a mainstay on cable news, where she was during 2020 and 2021. But she’s still active on Twitter, and maintains a following from those who should know better.

Last week the Miami Herald wrote about the arrest of her teenage son. They instantly took Jones’ portrayal of the event, and went with this headline — heralding Jones as a “whistleblower” (please) “who clashed with DeSantis” (love that for her), while claiming her son was “arrested over memes.”

In time, the story got updated. Now the headline reads “Son of Rebekah Jones, Florida whistle-blower, arrested in probe of threatening internet posts.” Yes the extremely sad story actually is that Jones’s son sent a bevy of messages claiming to be planning a school shooting, including things like “I want to shoot up the school” and “I have no hope in getting better so why not kill the losers at school.”

So actually Jones, who tweeted, “there is no freedom here. Only retaliatory rule by a fascist who wishes to be king,” shows she’s a liar, and the media should now see that.

And yet. We have people like Julie K. Brown, the excellent investigative reporter who broke the Jeffrey Epstein story wide open in 2018, tweeting the initial “arrested over memes” framing. When asked about correcting the story, she pushed back: “It’s called news. You can disagree with it but it happened. Covering it up doesn’t erase reality.”

In a pre-broken brain environment, setting the record straight would be instinctual. But now Rebekah Jones’ acceptability makes her immune to the sort of journalism required to do so — in an environment where Trump, and even DeSantis for some people, are the enemy of everything, no questions asked.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is running for president, and COVID is behind the panicked coverage

It would be impossible to do a newsletter focused on the broken brains of those in our elite institutions without mentioning COVID, which was a main contributing factor to so much of this over the past three years. As the Biden administration officially signals an end to the “emergency” this week, there are some COVID extremists who would like to keep it going — and these individuals over-index in the Acela corridor, and by extension, make up portions of the Acela Media.

While the COVID vaccine gets added to the childhood vaccine “schedule” here in America, we get news just weeks ago that the World Health Organization has now revised its recommendations on the COVID vaccine for kids, saying healthy kids actually don’t need it. You would think this sort of massive reversal would get covered by our corporate media — but it has largely been ignored.

Which brings us to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy is one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” as identified by the Biden administration, for his comments on the COVID vaccine, and he’s become demonized by the elite censorship collusion racket involving our government, tech platforms, and the media. Now he’s running for president as a Democrat — against Biden. “Per several people familiar, Steve Bannon had been encouraging this for months and believes RFK Jr. could be both a useful chaos agent in 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country,” was the tweet from CBS News’ Robert Costa announcing the news. It didn’t link to any corroborating sourcing. It wasn’t even turned into an article for his organization. He just tweeted what was essentially a smear, attributed it to “several people familiar,” whatever that even means, and moved on.

RFK called him out on Twitter for “circulating fake news”: “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign. I have never discussed a presidential run with Mr. Bannon.”

No correction from Costa, who used to be a better reporter before Trump got involved. Of course, Costa’s little tweet was nothing compared to stories like this hysterical piece from The Daily Beast, which enlisted three people to write why “everything he stands for is the antithesis of Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s working for the common good.”

Expect more of this misinformation-laden panic from the press as the primary season heats up.

WATCH IT… Succession… is incredible. I won’t ruin what happened Sunday night if you haven’t watched it yet (but really please go do that now). But instead relive the incredible speech inside his TV newsroom that Logan Roy delivered in episode 2 of this season, or have fun with Kieran Culkin AKA Roman Roy answering questions about the series for Esquire.

HEAR IT… This week’s All-In Podcast ended with 15 minutes on the death of entrepreneur Bob Lee, who was stabbed in San Francisco last week. None of the four knew Lee very well, but they all knew him second-hand, and they used the opportunity to talk about the state of the city they all used to live and work in that has deteriorated in monumental ways.

READ IT… The leaked Pentagon document story is a curious one — and it’s bubbling up now and not going away. I think this New York Times explainer is a good one, and it points to a military insider as the likely source of the leak. What we learn from the documents about Ukraine and Russia, and the way the U.S. spies on our allies and others, is just beginning to come to light.

QUICK HITS

Big exclusive story in Variety last week dives deep into Don Lemon’s “history of misogyny” at CNN — is this the middle of the end for the host at the network?
Interesting story in the New York Times about DeSantis vs. the press, and the “split” on the right over his actions about press freedom.
Janice Dean’s husband has sued former Governor Andrew Cuomo over the death of his parents in a New York nursing home.
Notable disclosure in The Dispatch over Harlan Crow (the focus of the ProPublica Clarence Thomas piece), calling him a funder and friend of the founders.
The owners of Los Angeles Magazine have fired its top editor, Maer Roshan. Also I did not know lawyer Mark Geragos was an owner of LA Mag?!
Anderson Cooper is turning to scripted TV — about his own life — with the show “Vanderbilt” for Amazon TV.

⏪ REWIND // FAST FORWARD: Pipeline Edition ⏩

⏪ On February 8, the famed journalist Seymour Hersh published a Substack piece titled “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” It was mostly ignored by the broader corporate media.

⏩ But slowly, bit by bit, his deeply-reported story appears closer and closer to the truth. Over the weekend the New York Times published an article that certainly points toward “allies” involvement in the most blatant way since Hersh’s story. Glenn Greenwald reads between the lines in a great Twitter thread.

MORE TK…

Who gets to have opinions but be considered “objective” in today’s journalistic environment? Astead Herndon is a “politics reporter” (and great podcast host) for the New York Times. He’s a “political analyst” for CNN. And yet, his reporting, and analysis, is deeply opinionated. He brings an interesting perspective. One I tend to disagree with, like in his analysis here about Tennessee, but it’s quite obviously opinion. And yet, because it’s a certain kind of opinion, he’s allowed to have it and say it publicly, and still be considered a certain kind of journalist. It’s a topic I’ll dig into more in a future newsletter…

GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM

Going back to the whole “rw/ff” section — this is quite the framing from the New York Times tweet and sub-hed: “It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more”? Well, isn’t that the interest of a journalism entity, then?

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Thanks for reading. Back later this week with a new Fourth Watch Podcast AND “Rabbit Hole” deep dive column…

—Steve

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