The Plot to Steal the Media: Send in the Clowns

How did Silicon Valley potty train formerly independent journalism watchdogs Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald? Eoin Higgins explains.

Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald discussing the “new political divide” with venture capitalist David Sacks in 2022 event in Miami. There’s no better way to establish your anti-establishment street cred than kissing the ass of the tech oligarchy.

Eoin Higgins is a journalist from New England. “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” was published today.

KS: Let's start with the tech billionaires. Who were they, and were they working independently or together in more of a coordinated strategy?

EH: The primary billionaires I'm talking about are Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and David Sacks. There’s Mark Zuckerberg and a few others, but those four, and really the first three, are the main ones.They worked to effect a takeover, almost, of alternative media and create an alternative media ecosystem that wasn’t independent at all, but subservient to their interests. I don't want to sound overly conspiratorial and say they invested in websites like Twitter, Substack, Rumble, and Callin with the goal of destroying mainstream and independent media, but that was a byproduct. They saw something that they didn't like – critical media – and thought to themselves, “We like to move fast and break things, let's invest in a bunch of different media properties.”

I don't think it was coordinated, they came to the idea individually. So Andreessen invested in Substack, Sacks in Callin, Thiel in Rumble, and Musk bought Twitter. In a lot of cases, the companies they invested in gave money to established media figures and plucked them out of existing newsrooms and into these siloed alternative media sites, which gave the new platforms more credibility and damaged the institutions they plucked them from. That’s how it all started.

KS: Why did they target the media in particular as opposed to universities, for example, or some other influential sector?

EH: Like I said, I don’t think they sat down together and planned this out, but the reason these guys went after the media was they wanted good coverage but the media wasn't controllable the way it used to be, it was becoming more critical. There had been kind of an unspoken agreement that the media would write favorable articles about the newest tech gadget or whatever, and reporters would keep getting invited to the cool conferences the industry sponsored. And it worked for a long time, through the boom of the 90s and and into the 2000s, but Gawker came around and treated Silicon Valley differently, and the industry didn't like that.

Over time the media exposed spying and surveillance and these guys started to get bad press and attacked on social media and they weren't able to push back.That made them angry, the peasants were starting to talk back. Gawker certainly pissed off Thiel, it outed him, which wasn’t the only thing that pissed him off, but it was kind of fucked up from a personal perspective.

Andreessen has always been thin-skinned. He did this Time magazine cover shoot in the 1990s, he’d founded Netscape and he's on the top of the world, it was the first commercial browser that really took off. It was a huge thing and he was on the cover of Time in his bare feet and people were making fun of him and for somebody like him, that really stung.

Musk is finally getting adulation and adoring crowds now on the far-right, he also seems to be a very insecure person. So there were different motivations, but at the core they targeted the media because they’re all very aware of how they're perceived and they want to be taken seriously, and be adored. That’s the aspect of the media that obsessed them and why they wanted to control it, and, of course, controlling information in today's world also allows you to shape the political discourse, which was a huge motivator too.

KS: I was going to ask you about that because these tech oligarchs have similar politics so I was assuming it wasn’t just wanting not to be mocked, but that the media is also an extraordinarily powerful political tool. So who were the voices on the left they bought?

EH: I looked at the phenomenon through Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. They were loud, affiliated with the left, and the book explains how they ended up where they are now.

KS: Did the tech oligarchs specifically pick those two? It seems like Musk, at least, picked Taibbi for the Twitter Files project? Was that strategic – was he thinking something like, this guy wrote that famous vicious piece on Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone, it would be good to have him on our side? And what about Greenwald?

EH: It’s an interesting question, how calculated was it? I think it was a complicated web of different factors.The subtitle of the book suggests there may have been a very direct link, that the tech billionaires bought their words. If people are expecting that they're going to be a little disappointed because you can't really track decisions like this 100 percent to one thing alone.

What you can do is look and see Peter Thiel invested in Rumble in May of 2021 and in August Rumble signed a huge deal with Greenwald. Before then, Greenwald criticized Thiel at least every once in a while and after he didn’t. Now he talks about Thiel in a positive way, and certainly doesn’t talk to any great degree about the surveillance powers of Palantir, his baby.

I think Thiel picked Greenwald because his ideology is somewhat flexible on certain topics. He does have really principled takes on some stuff, like Gaza, but he started working with people like Thiel and people in the Thiel-verse, and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. I’m now doing this in reverse order, but after he left The Intercept in 2020 he joined Substack and he didn't get a paid deal, but it was a company that's heavily funded by Marc Andreessen and Glenn is not the type of person who's then going to attack Andreessen or his interests. I wrote an article in 2021 looking at how he talked about Fox News before and after he started appearing on it, and it's stunning. I hadn't expected the data to come back so sharply, but once he becomes a Fox talking head, he turns into a PR person for them.

If you were watching this, you’d think this guy will be a loyal soldier so it made sense for Thiel to invest in him even if he's going to say a lot of things he won't like. Because the overall effect is he’s mostly going to be against liberals and liberalism and the left in general, and people with Thiel’s politics basically believe anybody to the left of George W. Bush is a communist. Glenn has such antipathy to liberals that he’s happy to oblige.

As far as Taibbi goes, he's always been very successful but he's had his ups and downs, he was semi-canceled when he was on tour with the Eric Garner book, and he started tiling to the right and found a welcoming audience. Musk chose him for the Twitter Files in part because David Sachs recommended him – Andreessen recommended Bari Weiss – so Taibbi was already known to these guys, they knew that he would be a friendly voice and take these highly curated documents from Musk without objecting on any kind of journalistic principles and send the message that they wanted sent.

And it paid off. He turned that into a lot of Substack subscriptions and he stayed in Musk's good graces until he threatened his livelihood by suppressing Substack links on Twitter. Once he did that, Taibbi all of a sudden had moral problems about what he was doing.

KS: It was the same with Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar. He had no moral problems with him being a tech oligarch when he worked at The Intercept, Omidyar made him filthy rich, but when he was on his way out and after he left Omidyar became evil.

EH: It's pretty ridiculous that it’s so transparent, there's no attempt to hide it, it’s just blatant opportunism. So that's why these guys were selected by the tech billionaires, but it’s still more complicated than just drawing a direct line where you could say that it was the single definitive factor.

KS: Taibbi and Greenwald both insist, preposterously at this point, that they didn’t change, their critics have. Did they ever think they were cutting a deal with the devil or was it more like the frog in the boiling water? Or can they really believe that they haven’t changed at all?

EH: I asked Glenn that question about Matt – like what the fuck happened here? I can't remember now exactly how he phrased it, but I reproduced his answer almost in full in the book, because I thought it was so interesting, it seemed like he was talking about himself as well. He said something about how people begin to value different things as they get older, security and normalcy become things that become more important to hold onto.

With Glenn, a pivotal moment—he spoke about it when I interviewed him for the book—was watching the liberal blogosphere he had allied himself with during the latter Bush years support a lot of the same policies under Obama, and I think that's a legitimate complaint.

KS: It is.

EH: Where he loses me is that liberals are evil and the right is fine, or at least not as bad. And it's like, no, that's not what's going on here. When it came to Trump, Glenn and Taibbi both thought the Russiagate stuff was insane, and I can relate to that, but it reinforced the idea that liberals are the problem here, they’re the Deep State, or whatever terminology they would use, and that animus towards liberals became the most important thing.

The author. Photo by Molly Haley.

I criticize liberals and the Democratic Party all the time. One reason is that I don't care about Republicans in that way, is that I'm not expecting anything from them. Somewhere along the way, Glenn lost that and he probably justifies a lot of like what he does now by saying, I used to be allied with these people and they betrayed the principles that I believed in, so fuck them, and there’s probably some of that with Taibi as well.

KS: The irony is that if what bothered Greenwald was that liberals were unprincipled and unwilling to criticize their own side, he's just like that now. As you said, even when he’s critical the right is always better, so even on Gaza, where I share his general opinion, he was a lot more critical about AOC for not living up to her rhetoric, or selling out, than guys like Matt Gaetz. But overall AOC is a lot better on Israel-Gaza than Gaetz was when he was in congress, for example she boycotted Netanyahu’s speech to congress and Gaetz cheered throughout.

I try to keep in mind that my political views are outside of the mainstream, and people with my views would never be elected, so demanding that AOC and the rest of The Squad live up to my standards without compromising is ridiculous to expect. That’s not to say AOC should never be criticized, I also criticize liberals and Democrats all the time, and for the same reasons you do. I have a very negative view of the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be a Republican, and yeah, AOC is very ambitious and she does a lot of things that she should be criticized for, but comparatively a sellout AOC is preferable to Matt Gaetz fulfilling his destiny as a fascist. At least criticize both.

EH: I have a similar belief structure, I realize most people think my politics are insane, so I don’t expect liberals in the Democratic Party to adopt Eoin-ism as their ideology, although they should. But, yeah, Glenn manages to twist everything he says. On Gaza, the Democratic Party is not covering itself glory right now, but he’s just kind of ignoring the straight up genocide apology that's coming from the other side as well. He doesn't seem to care about that.

KS: So, how did the tech billionaires benefit from this deal they cut with, not just with Greenwald and Taibbi, but with their general investment in the media? Did they reap the rewards they wanted?

EH: The mainstream and independent are weaker and less critical than as long as I can ever remember, so they have a subservient media. They also helped create a media environment that relentlessly puts out huge amounts of information, but a lot of it’s untrue, and that has devalued the entire institution, which the tech oligarchs wanted. Musk certainly got what he wanted by buying Twitter; Trump’s president and he’s in the White House.

Thiel is a little more interesting than the other guys. One of the reasons is he invests in all kinds of different things, he throws everything at the wall. He's given money to art projects of weird hipsters in New York, he has money in different publications and think tanks all over the country and the world. He's probably pretty happy with how Rumble is doing, because at least it's providing a place for people who think like him to say what they want and push their message forward.

So to the extent these guys are ever happy with anything, they’re happy with the media they got.