Returning to ‘press that challenges people in power’ will be difficult for US media after Trump – Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi

14 Nov, 2020 17:38

The mainstream US media has become a Trump-bashing proxy for the Democrats over the last four years, and regaining objectivity under President Biden would be a tough task, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi told RT’s Going Underground.

“The press has changed radically during the Trump era,” Taibbi said while speaking with host Afshin Rattansi. “We’ve seen a shift towards all corporate news organizations essentially being proxies for the Democratic Party.”

The media justified their one-sidedness by saying that “we have to oppose Donald Trump,” but they won’t need to be doing this anymore with veteran Democrat Biden in the White House, Rolling Stone magazine’s contributing editor and host of the ‘Useful Idiots’ podcast pointed out.

How do you go back to being a press that challenges people in power? I think it’s very, very difficult to take that step once you’ve taken the step backwards – into a more politicized media.

The mainstream outlets have been recently obsessed over the possibly of Trump refusing to willingly give up power to Biden, because “it’s like a lot of bombshell news stories in the last four years … they want to milk every bit of sensationalism out of it,” he said.

Taibbi himself believes that “it’s going to play itself out,” and that Trump will leave despite all of his claims of fraud and attempts to legally challenge the results of the election.

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When asked why the media didn’t want to cover the stories that really worried the ordinary Americans – like that fact that 40 million people in the country have to rely on the food stamp program for nutrition – the journalist replied that “what’s in the news is dictated by a handful of people in New York, Washington and LA, who run the biggest news organizations.”

“The press and the political class, they have a disconnect in terms of understanding where most people are in the US,” he acknowledged.

Watch the full interview with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi on RT.com or RT's Going Underground YouTube page.

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