Matt Taibbi, You Suck

Taibbi once derided prominent right-wing crank Lara Logan as a pathetic hack and establishment suck-up. Now that he's one too, Taibbi has become her fan and political collaborator.

I’m rarely surprised anymore when I hear word that Matt Taiibi has reached a new, previously unthinkable low in journalism because I’ve followed his transformation from the days when he was a scathing critic of the rich and powerful who wrote “The Great Vampire Squid Keeps On Sucking,” his epic 2009 story for Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs, to his present debased state as a humorless drone who’s become immensely wealthy by pandering to the conservative political and business oligarchy. At this point, sucking up to the same people he previously skewered is his basic business model and there’s no doubt Taibbi will keep sucking for the duration of his journalism career before becoming the press secretary for the Heritage Foundation or Goldman Sachs.

So when someone tells me Taibbi has finally hit rock bottom as a journalist, I assume it’s temporary and it will only be a short time before he plunges into the muck and sets a new personal record Nevertheless, I was stunned when I recently learned of the budding political and professional kinship Taibbi has developed with Lara Logan, the utterly unhinged right-wing journalist and conspiracy theorist.

In a Rolling Stone story back in 2010, Taibbi described Logan – very accurately – as a dishonest hack and establishment sycophant who epitomized everything wrong with network news. 

Nowadays Taibbi considers Logan to be a reputable reporter who was driven out of mainstream journalism for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom. On September 29, Taibbi and Logan will join a star-studded cast of right-wing morons, grifters, and crackpots, including Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand, and Tulsi Gabbard, as VIP speakers at the “Rescue the Republic: Join the Resistance” rally in Washington. 

In 2012, Taibbi interviewed Occupy Wall Street activists about the mortgage crisis. He hasn’t changed at all since then and he’d go back and do the same today even if it would take a lot longer to get there now from his mansion in the suburbs. But hey, that’s why God invented chauffeurs. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

I very recently learned of Taibbi’s newfound affinity for Logan alliance when fact checking a long overdue story – and it’s going to be briefly delayed again while I write this one – about his friend Glenn Greenwald, who made a similar cash-generating transition along with him. I knew Greenwald was another new member of  Logan’s fan club who’d previously scorned her work, as he did in a 2010 piece for Salon, when he said she “sees herself as part of the government and military, rather than an adversarial watchdog” and cited her as a prime example of what journalism had “degenerated into,” and when I did a Google search to look for the evidence I found Taibbi’s 2010 Rolling Stone story and a Twitter post he wrote about her earlier this year. 

The 2010 story, which was headlined “Lara Logan, You Suck,” savaged Logan for recently criticizing the late, great journalist Michael Hastings, who at the time was Taibbi’s colleague at Rolling Stone. Logan, a former correspondent for 60 Minutes and then CBS News’s chief foreign correspondent, and other “idiots” in the mainstream media suffered “from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for,” Taibbi charged. She seemed to think she was employed by the country’s richest and most influential people, he said, when in fact as a journalist, she was honor-bound to represent the American people.

In his Twitter post this year on March 3, Taibbi had a new and greatly improved opinion of Logan, though during the fourteen years following between the 2010 story and the tweet, Logan had left CBS for Fox News and descended from there to writing for fringe right-wing outlets. In 2022, she joined the board of the conservative nonprofit America's Future, which is led by former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s short-lived national security advisor.

Taibbi explained in the tweet that Logan’s fall from journalism grace didn’t have anything to do with the quality of her work, and though he didn’t say it explicitly it’s clear he was suggesting the cause was her unacceptably conservative political views. Logan was one of “many like her who have been denounced and defamed after working at the highest levels of the business,” he wrote. “The press isn’t just betraying its audience, it’s eating its own. Thank you, Lara.”

It doesn’t require Freud to understand that when he said Logan was one of many journalists “like her” who had been victims of political persecution, it was a self-reference to the once-prominent journalist Matt Taibbi, who’s now often accused of being a craven GOP apologist and propagandist who’d become such a loathsome hypocrite and right-wing doormat that he’d buddy up with Senator Ted Cruz, a man he once called “Tea Party crazy” and “physically repellent,” or depicted as a useful idiot of the political right who’d accept an invitation to speak at a political event with partisan hacks like Lara Logan, which had happened once again just a moment ago. 

And why do his critics smear poor, pitiful Taibbi? For no other reason than he did all those things! Have you no sense of decency, sirs and madams, at long last?

Logan is no more a victim of political persecution than Taibbi, though she pretends to be as well. It’s true, as Taibbi said in his tweet last March, that Logan is no longer working at the highest levels of the media, but she’s not working at the lowest levels either, including fifth-rate conservative outlets, where she’d easily have found refuge if her plunge to the bottom of the business had happened because her professional colleagues had betrayed and slandered her, as Taibbi had claimed. 

But that wasn’t the cause of Logan’s professional travails. The reason for that was that even in the lunatic asylums at the outer edge of the right-wing media, Logan was known to be a delusional conspiracy theorist. Taibbi’s Twitter post came about a week after Logan participated in an event at America’s Future, Flynn’s nonprofit, and shared her view of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which spread in far-right circles during the 2016 election and proposed that Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring at Washington restaurants, including the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. While she’d originally been a skeptic, Logan said, after conducting her own independent investigation, she’d concluded, “Holy guacamole! This actually is all true.” 

Her career path from CBS to America’s Future began when she left the network in 2018 five years after she’d been demoted when her report on the infamous Benghazi attack had to be retracted. From there she joined the conservative media company Sinclair Broadcast Group, and after a short stint there signed up in 2020 with Fox Nation.

In 2022, Logan was forced to resign after she compared Anthony Fauci to the Nazi SS concentration camp physician Josef Mengele. “They don’t want independent thinkers,” Logan later said in describing the brutal censorship Fox Nation imposed on her reporting. “They don’t want people who follow the facts regardless of the politics.”

The same year, Logan became an on-air commentator at Newsmax, but her free speech rights were trampled there too and she was soon blacklisted by the network. If you’ve ever watched its programming for more than five minutes, being too crazy for Newsmax is genuinely remarkable. 

On the other hand, Logan did push the boundaries during her short time at the network, which came to an immediate close after she said the international global elite was dominated by leftists “who want us eating insects, cockroaches...while they dine on the blood of children.” Logan also ruffled feathers that night when she charged “the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants.”

Free Speech martyr Lara Logan in happier times, during an interview on Newsmax before she was banned from the network’s airwaves in 2022 for simply saying the global elite “want us eating insects, cockroaches...while they dine on the blood of children.”

Taibbi’s March 6 Twitter post responded to a tweet of Logan’s about her recent appearance at a “Roundtable Discussion on the Covid Cartel” hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, where she was one of about two dozen participants on a “panel of experts” that included several of the scheduled headliners at the upcoming Rescue the Republic rally and in-house congressional specialist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Part of Logan’s opening statement at the Roundtable was included in the tweet, which Taibbi presumably read, and it must have warmed his heart.

Many news outlets and reporters “masquerade as non-partisan media watchdogs,” Logan said, but in reality they were “highly political, paid propagandists whose entire reason for being is to crush anyone who stands in their way and along with them, the long held and cherished ideas of free speech, free thinking and free minds.”

Meanwhile, journalists with critical reasoning skills who strayed beyond the borders of media groupthink suffered severe reprisals, as Logan had experienced herself. “For almost a decade, I have been targeted and falsely branded and accused of many things I did not do,” said Logan, who identified her tormentor only as “They,” but despite They’s vicious attacks on “my work, my character, my sanity,” she would never abandon the fight for free speech.”

Fortunately, she was not alone. They – whose gender Logan didn’t disclose either but for the sake of simplicity They will be masculine from this point going forward – and his “political allies and their puppet masters...know how to kill a journalist without murdering them,” she continued in the most chilling part of her statement:

We call it cancel culture - in truth it is a death sentence, and they get away with it because they have information dominance. Some are strong enough to survive but only a few like Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and Matt Taibbi are able to reach greater heights and thrive. 

It’s certainly speaks to their character that Taibbi, Greenwald, Carlson withstood all of the mysterious They’s nefarious attacks and secret machinations, and somehow managed to survive in their squalid estates subsisting only on the meager multimillions of dollars they were able to squirrel away after being driven underground.

Happily, Taibbi’s voice hasn’t been completely squelched as occurred with Logan and he can periodically be seen  thriving and reaching greater heights on Newsmax, unless he makes a harmless slip up like she did and ends up being barred there as well. When last seen July 20 on the network’s show "America Right Now,” Taibbi “criticized the liberal media's handling of election coverage” during this year’s presidential campaign, in the word’s of a summary of the segment, which he said Trump would likely benefit from because news coverage was biased towards his candidacy.

When Taibbi was introduced on the show, he was identified as an “independent journalist,” which bolsters his standing as a rigorously honest, trustworthy reporter, as it did when he was described as “a self-professed critic of Trump during an appearance he made on Newsmax last year, which is completely fair and balanced, just as it would be accurate if Josef Mengele were still available to be interviewed for cable news and the host told the audience “he was a self-professed prominent academic and skilled surgeon who had extensive experience operating on patients in a wartime environment.”

Keep that in mind the next time you think about slandering Taibbi or any of the other dwindling few genuine journalism truthtellers we have have left to keep us safe from fake news. That’s why even a low-rent right-wing outlet like Newmax trusts Taibbi to tell the full truth and nothing but the truth, and criticize Republicans a whole lot less than Democrats, just like all the other conservative guests on the network do whether the audience likes it or not.

Take it straight from the self-professed words of Taibbi, he’s the same self-professed independent journalist he’s always been. He hasn’t changed a bit since 2014 when he slammed Logan, the only one who’s changed is They.