'Tankie truth-teller' Matt Taibbi mocked following MSNBC host's 'public beat-down'
Journalist Matt Taibbi admitted to repeated errors in his reporting — and was left stammering — in a brutal interview segment Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
Hasan called out Taibbi for multiple falsehoods in Taibbi’s "Twitter Files" claims regarding the 2020 election.
“You talk a lot about the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in the Twitter Files, which Stanford and the University of Washington founded to monitor attacks on our elections. You say some stuff about them that a lot of your critics say is not true and that affects your credibility. You say the EIP was formed in response to the government dropping its proposal for a disinformation governance board, but that’s not true: It was formed two years earlier. You suggest it was government funded, even though it wasn’t."
“You say they labeled 22 million tweets as misinformation in the runup to the 2020 vote. They didn’t,” Hasan said. “They flagged 3,000 election-misinformation tweets so you were only 21,997,000 off. You also claimed the EIP was partnered with the government cyber-security and infrastructure agency CISA to censor Twitter, but you mix up CISA, a Homeland Security agency, with Center for Internet Security – CIS – a non-profit. In fact, you added an 'A' to CIS in brackets to make that false claim. It’s just error after error.”
Taibbi admitted on air, “That was a mistake. That was an error, but the other ones aren’t.”
But Taibbi would admit on his own Twitter account that three of Hassan’s accusations were correct. (And then Taibbi then launched a tweetstorm of attacks at MSNBC for its coverage of other subjects.)
The devastation did not go unnoticed at The Bulwark. Here’s how Jonathan V. Last reported it.
“Russia-loving, Musk errand boy Matt Taibbi went on Mehdi Hasan’s show this week. No más! Those with a humiliation kink will definitely want to watch the whole thing. Those with weak stomachs should probably pass."
“Normally I’d be against this sort of premeditated public beat-down. But here’s the thing about Taibbi: If anyone deserves it, it’s him. Because this isn’t the low-point of his career. Heck, this isn’t even his most embarrassing moment of the last year."
Last offered this sarcastic assessment of Taibbi:
“Just another brave, anti-woke, tankie truth-teller getting targeted by the dreaded liberal media. Because truly, liberal media bias is the single most important threat facing the world.”
You can watch a portion of Hasan's interview with Taibbi below or at this link.