- metadata:
- source: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/mainstream-media-slain-in-canada?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
- people: [[Matt Taibbi]]
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# Mainstream Media Slain in Canada - TK News by Matt Taibbi
> ## Excerpt
> In a wild and oddly nasty standoff, author Douglas Murray and I steamrolled Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg in the most decisive win in the history of Canada's Munk debates
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_Expanding upon my previous four thoughts about Matt Taibbi and the fifties…_
Wednesday night I had the privilege of taking part in the prestigious Munk debates in Toronto, Ontario. Along with _The War on the West_ author and reporter Douglas Murray, we took on _New York Times_ columnist Michelle Goldberg and _New Yorker_ writer Malcolm Gladwell, arguing: “Be it resolved: Don’t trust mainstream media.”
A pre-event vote of attendees and listeners showed 48% support for our “side,” versus 52% for theirs. 82% of thousands of audience members claimed to be willing to change their minds. They were telling the truth, as it turned out. In a bitter slugfest that featured tense confrontations, impassioned oratory (especially from Douglas), and several almost unbelievably petty exchanges, Douglas and I swung the vote 39% in our favor, ending with a 67%-33% win, the [most decisive rout in the history of the event](https://www.nationalreview.com/news/matt-taibbi-douglas-murray-dominate-trust-in-media-debate/).
I’m on the road and not able to post the full transcript yet, but will when I can. In the meantime I wanted to comment on a few highlights and lowlights.
Sadly it’s not false modesty on my part when I say Douglas’s quick wit and eloquence carried the day — he was incredible, captivating the audience throughout — but it’s also true that on the substance, we were essentially unopposed. Despite repeated attempts on our part to engage on the core question, the event disintegrated almost from the start into a weirdly personal affair that at one point mid-debate had me remembering the famous fist-fighting girl scout scene in _Airplane!_
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The luck of the draw had me giving the opening remarks. One offhand passage needs highlighting because it somehow turned out to be the debate’s main battlefield:
> _\[Once\], the commercial strategy of news was to aim for the whole audience. A TV news broadcast aired at dinnertime and was designed to be watched by the whole family, from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulking lefty teenager. **This system had its flaws. However, making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits, too. For one, it inspired more trust. Gallup polls twice showed Walter Cronkite of CBS to be the most trusted person in America. That would never happen today…**_
That one little line inspired ridiculous quantities of vitriol. Hours after the event, head on a pillow, I relaxed enough to laugh about it. In the moment, though, I was pissed.
What happened: Gladwell seized on the line and repeatedly asserted it meant I was pining for the all-white, all-male paradise of the fifties and sixties. He went there five different times! By the last time, I threw my hands up in the air, and even sweet old ladies in the audience were rolling their eyes. A sampling of the “Matt, who was born in 1970, misses Jim Crow” quotes:
> _“I was greatly amused by the affection Matt Taibbi has for the age of Walter Cronkite… in that moment the mainstream media was populated entirely by white men from elite schools.”_
>
> _“I just wanted to make a short list of the people who were not ‘spoken to’ by journalists in the 1950s and 60s… Black people, women, poor people, gay people, people with mildly left-wing views…”_
>
> _“When Matt and Doug speak about the mainstream media, they’re acting as if there’s a big room… in which everyone gathers every morning and makes up the agenda for the day and the people fly in from the big news networks and someone from CBC comes down, and this Cabal of high minded, well-paid elite white… journalists, some of them the ones Matt seems to have such affection for…”_
>
> _“Matt, I understand that you do have this wonderful nostalgia for the way things used to be, but I think that you need to fact check some of your nostalgic notions about the wonderful world of the 1950s…”_
The “most trusted” polls I mentioned Cronkite winning were actually in the seventies and eighties, but he was on a roll. Moreover, as he hammered the theme, Gladwell kept pulling the schoolyard tactic of mispronouncing my name, repeatedly calling me “Tee-AHH-bee,” even after I corrected him onstage. The great fast-food philosopher and factory-producer of bestsellers wanted to make clear, I guess, that I hadn’t reached a professional level of sufficient height to penetrate his lofty consciousness.
Murray guessed in the green room that Gladwell would probably use his opening statement time to wander to and fro in TED-talk style, wringing hands and furrowing his brow. He did that, but the effect was muted because Murray preempted him, spending his opening statement wandering the stage and stroking his chin in a subtle Gladwell impersonation that at that point was still all in fun.
But once things got personal, the mood shifted. The Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto is an acoustical marvel, by the way. You could hear a pin drop in there despite it being packed with thousands of spectators surrounding the debaters, with steep vertical loges and even rows of on-stage seating that made it seem like the audience was in our laps.
The first turn in the debate came when Gladwell turned his disdain on Douglas, suddenly deciding to call him “Doug.” In my mind’s eye I remember Murray turning to me and mouthing, _What the fuck?_ It’s possible I imagined this (I’ll need to look at the video). Anyway, a flutter shot through the crowd, which then burst out laughing when Douglas replied:
“Well, _Malc…_”
There was some back-and-forth in the debate over the supposed issue at hand. A highlight was a monologue by Murray aimed at the Canadian media, which he said acted as an “amen chorus of the Canadian government” during the trucker protests, blasting its representatives as “utterly rancid and corrupt.” This, he said, addressing the Toronto crowd, was especially shameful because “in this country, your mainstream media is funded by the government.”
As you see, this earned cheers and applause, but Goldberg soon after stopped the bleeding by reminding everyone she was the only person who’d actually covered the protests in person. I really believe, though, that the event turned when Gladwell wouldn’t let Cronkite go. It was a small thing, but it happened to coincide with a subtext of the discussion, i.e. the unearned waft of superiority emanating from the mainstream press. Journalists were once more down-to-earth, being mostly fuckups and castoffs from other professions who tended to feel more comfortable in the company of bartenders or hot dog vendors than politicians. The latter were universally thought of as scum, or at least suspect.
Now a corporate press pass is a status symbol, reporters tend socially to run in the same circles as the people they cover, and when presented with the growing mountain of evidence that they’ve lost the trust of the public (see this recent [Gallup survey](https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx)), the reflex is to declare the public defective. Toward the end of the debate, Gladwell made this exact argument. After one last time invoking my longing for the fifties, when the press was so exclusive that “people like Michelle and I wouldn’t have been on the stage,” he shifted without any hint of contradiction to question the current wisdom of having mainstream media institutions “perfectly match” the makeup of the rabble:
> _What would restore the trust of Matt and Doug in mainstream media? **With Matt, the answer is obvious: he would like if the world resembled 1955 again. That will fill him with joy, like more stories on the Hunter Biden laptop…**_
>
> _I think that they would be happier if they felt that the composition of prestigious journalistic institutions more closely reflected the full range of ideological attitudes in American public issues. That is actually a serious proposition._
>
> _I don’t mean to make light of it at all, but it is one that makes me a little uncomfortable. Because I don’t think that you can ultimately say that trust in institutions is reserved solely for institutions that perfectly match the characteristics of the general population. It is like saying that we don’t trust kindergarten teachers, because kindergarten teachers are over-represented with people having an enormous amount of patience for the temper tantrums of four year olds… I mean they are an extraordinary and very specific subgroup of the population that performs very well in that particular task more generally…_
I watched this performance with awe. If douchebaggery were an ice cream cone, the guy would be melting all over the stage. I almost felt bad.
When the results were announced, he scurried off stage, doubtless already carrying the germ of a new bestseller (thought the fifties-obsessed white male, acidly).
By the way, here’s a passage I wrote in _Hate Inc_. about the Cronkite era:
> _There was a lot that was wrong and deceptive about the era of news Cronkite dominated. News watchers were presented with a highly limited and simplistic vision of the world, presented almost entirely by white men. Coverage downplayed or omitted countless injustices, both at home and abroad…_
Thanks so much to my brilliant partner Douglas Murray, who came to my defense more than once, and to the wise citizens of Toronto, who were great hosts and even better voters. Be it resolved: that was damned satisfying.