The Utility of the Asshole in Contemporary American Journalism
Matt Taibbi, other assholes, and the necessity of their disregard for what you care about
Matt Taibbi is, along with Glenn Greenwald, the best embodiment of a type in contemporary journalism (probably historical journalism too) that I just think of, rather simply, as “the asshole,” or maybe more precisely “the useful asshole.”
I was reminded of this while reading his account of his rather crazy Twitter journey of the last few months, first as one of the journalists tapped by Elon Musk to report on what became known as the Twitter Files, and now as the most visible journalist to abandon Twitter in protest of recent efforts by Musk to use the social media platform to hamstring Notes, which is Substack’s new competitor to Twitter. Taibbi writes:
We were never on the same side as Musk exactly, but there was a clear confluence of interests rooted in the fact that the same institutional villains who wanted to suppress the info in the Files also wanted to bankrupt Musk. That’s what makes the developments of the last week so disappointing. There was a natural opening to push back on the worst actors with significant public support if Musk could hold it together and at least look like he was delivering on the implied promise to return Twitter to its “free speech wing of the free speech party” roots. Instead, he stepped into another optics Punji Trap, censoring the same Twitter Files reports that initially made him a transparency folk hero.
Even more bizarre, the triggering incident revolved around Substack, a relatively small company that’s nonetheless one of the few oases of independent media and free speech left in America. In my wildest imagination I couldn’t have scripted these developments, especially my own very involuntary role.
I don’t have anything interesting to say about the issue itself, but I’m reminded of what makes Taibbi such a valuable presence in the discourse. He doesn’t seem to give a shit, or rather he doesn’t seem to respond to the same structure of incentives and disincentives that most of the rest of the profession does. Of course he gives a shit; it’s just not about the same things. His sense of self-worth and his professional identity answer to a different pantheon of masters than what’s customary in professional journalism. He also has an immense amount of faith in his own judgements, a visceral distaste for authority, and a striking lack of personal empathy for his journalistic peers, whom he thinks are mostly sheep and wimps (shimps? weeps?).
He’s an asshole, in other words, but—and this I think is the key point—we should want at least a healthy percentage of our journalists and intellectuals to be precisely that. I don’t read journalists for their virtue, but rather their intelligence, diligence, independence, and in some (though not all) cases their disregard for, or active aversion to, the conventional wisdom. He was happy to work with Musk because it was a great story, and he’s happy to part ways with Musk because he was never in it for the access to power.
I haven’t fully theorized this yet, but my instinct is that we don’t want all of our journalists to be this way, that there’s a lot of utility in having an establishment, consensus-oriented journalism that collectively tells the semi-true uni-narrative of what’s going on in the world. If this is the case, though, a healthy journalistic ecosystem would be one in which there’s an active dialectic between that establishment and the assholes pricking it, poking it, deflating it, and ultimately influencing and correcting it from the margins.
We need more Matt Taibbi's, to be sure. But we don't need to call them assholes. I agree with all of what you say here, but ""he's an asshole, in other words" is, in my view an utter non sequitur.