Matt Taibbi threw away a lot of the credibility he had as a journalist by acting as Elon Musk’s stenographer for his selectively edited “Twitter files.” He has thrown away even more by appearing on Newsmax to defending Robert Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaxxer conspiracies — just one more part of Newsmax’s summer of defending Kennedy amid his presidential run. Jeremy Frankel summed up one appearance in a July 20 article:
Democrats who insist on censoring “disinformation” do not seem to understand the First Amendment or what free speech is, journalist Matt Taibbi told Newsmax on Thursday.
Taibbi, having testified before the U.S. House’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government earlier this year about the Twitter Files, censorship, and the First Amendment, told “Eric Bolling The Balance” that it felt like “dejà vu” watching Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. testify at Thursday’s hearing before that same subcommittee.
“I had dejà vu watching the video because I obviously sat in that very same chair and testified in front of that same committee and met a lot of the same hostility from the same members who, similarly, didn’t want to hear anything about censorship, didn’t engage in the topic at all,” Taibbi said.
[…]“Judges over the years have specifically made the bar for intervention, government intervention in speech extremely high … the standard is incitement to imminent lawless violence, which Robert F. Kennedy is nowhere near that, he hasn’t even gotten anything wrong,” Taibbi said. “As he points out, he’s being criticized for something called ‘malinformation,’ which the Department of Homeland Security talks about, which is true information, but has a message they don’t like very much.
Taibbi elaborated further in another Newsmax appearance, summed up in a July 24 article by Nicole Wells:
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi told Newsmax on Monday that the governmental entities that pushed censorship through Twitter prior to Elon Musk’s ownership had to come up with a new category of misinformation to flag things like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tweet about suspicious deaths that were potentially linked to COVID-19 vaccines.
“They had to create a new genre of misinformation to cover things like RFK’s tweet,” Taibbi said during an appearance on Newsmax’s “The Record with Greta Van Susteren.” “They call it mal information, which is really, basically, true information that has what they think is an adverse political outcome, that might result in people not getting vaccinated. But there’s no wrong fact in there, necessarily, which I think is a particularly dangerous form of censorship.”
A new batch of Twitter Files released on Friday reveals that Twitter processed a request to review Kennedy’s tweet in 2021 at the request of a law firm acting on behalf of Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
The message included a screenshot of RFK Jr.’s tweet and said, “Hi team can you take a look at this tweet against our covid policy please?”
Note that Wells did not repeat the content of the Kennedy tweet in question — in which he blamed the death of baseball great Hank Aaron on a COVID vaccine. And contrary to her assertion, Aaron’s death was never “suspicious”; he died of natural causes at age 86. Taibbi lied as well by describing Kennedy’s tweet as “basically, true information that has what they think is an adverse political outcome, that might result in people not getting vaccinated.” It was never true that Aaron died of COVID, and Kennedy was deliberately misinforming people by suggesting otherwise.
(A few days earlier, Newsmax uncritically repeated Republican Rep. Jim Jordan’s bogus claim that Kennedy’s tweet was just ‘pointing out facts.”)
Wells also called Taibbi a “Twitter files journalist” — in fact, he left the project months earlier amid an acrimonious falling-out with Elon Musk — and an “independent journalist,” even though there was nothing independent about his doing Musk’s bidding.