Tucker, Twitter, and Taibbi

Tucker, Twitter, and Taibbi

On this episode of The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer, Ryan Cooper discusses the reactionary media and its allies.

Jeet Heer
Facebook
Twitter
Email
Flipboard
Pocket

This has been an eventful week in both the news media and social media. Tucker Carlson was apparently fired from Fox News. Meanwhile, Twitter under the aegis of Elon Musk continues to be in turmoil as it changes verification policies, to the irritation of longtime users.

To make sense of it all, I talked to Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect. Ryan has produced a fascinating Youtube video about the journalist Matt Taibbi, a one-time muckraking radical who in recent years has increasingly aligned himself with the reactionary agendas of Carlson and Musk. As it turns out, Taibbi’s trajectory provides a perfect storyline for tracing recent changes in the media and also the disturbing tendency of some former leftists to shift right under the impetus of the culture wars.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts:

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


Ad Policy
x