Watching Shellenberger's descent into conspiracy mania has been really disappointing, and it kind of reminds me of James Lindsay, who I also think used to be a pretty interesting guy.
I really enjoyed Shellenberger's reporting when he wrote "San Fransicko" and it influenced my subscription to Public. About a year ago I finally couldn't take the wild headlines anymore, but since I had already renewed for a full-year subscription, I spent the next 11 months not reading anything he published- my subscription finally expired last month.
I think he's another example of someone who was treated unfairly in circles he considered to be his 'people', and the stress of it totally tipped him over the edge. You hate to see it...
Completely agree, Christina. The personal resentment initially fuels legitimate grievances, than the ad revenue checks come and incentivize more and more illogical contrarianism and audience capture. There’s nothing journalistic or careful about the stuff that shellenberger, weinstein, peterson, etc. are doing these days.
I had a similar experience with Freddie Deboer after he was really rude to subscribers in his substack comments section. This was long before Hamas attacked Israel. I had also done the annual subscription so I just waited it out.
I also subscribed to Shellenberger but stopped over UFO stuff. (I don't think that's a real thing.)
Freddie Deboer to me is like the left-wing version of Kevin Williamson. Both are people I don't agree with the majority of the time, but holy shit, they are mad talented at writing abrasive af essays that make you say "Well, to be honest, they have a point."
I could swear there was an essay where Kevin Williamson, who has major on-going beefs with Paul Krugman, points out that Krugman says something like "you know, you're one of the few people who calls to get a quote when you write an article about me."
I can't find it with google now, just them bitching at each other, so it's possible I have the polarities reversed or even the wrong writer. It might be a paywalled Ta-Nehisi Coates article.
I also took issue with Freddie Deboer’s egregious lack of editing to the point that several occasions made it difficult to read. I unsubscribed because I figured if he can’t bother to edit work at all, I can’t be bothered to pay.
Thank you so much for having the courage to call this type of “journalism” out. There a lot of “Michael Shellenberger’s” running around in the “heterodox” social media space. They seem to have become drunk on their own internet fame, propelled by a shallow contrarianism that the masses are all too eager to lap up without question. Taibbi and Kirn aren’t too far behind…
Quite dismissive: "drunk on fame, shallow, the masses lap it up."
I take it you aren't one of the "masses." Are the masses everyone but you?
Read the Columbia Journalism review piece on the media and Russiagate. Consider the epic disaster that is the mainstream media's coverage of pediatric "gender medicine." Read Jonathan Kay's piece on the NYT and the fictitious dead children they created.
Criticize something that you believe is wrong, but keep your head about it. The people you listed have done the work that we used to expect the mainstream media to do. Without them, you'd have no idea what was going on.
I agree with you that some of those people have done some good work in the past. I don’t think that fact negates any of the concerns that Jesse presents in his piece, and I think those concerns apply to many of the most prominent alternative media space personalities.
The whole point I've been making is that people here are not just criticizing Shellenberger's piece on SNL. They are condemning him as an all-around hack and whacko. He has a long resume with plenty of good work. I think Jesse's critique of the SNL story is persuasive. I also think Jesse got riled up and overdid it.
It's too strong to say "fictitious dead children". Rather, despite claims to the contrary, it was not proven that there were 215 dead children in an orchard in Kamloops. In the years since anomalies were found in Kamloops, there has been no excavation. If there ever is an excavation it may be that that the bodies of children will be found (in Canada's tragic residential school history, poor records were kept of indigenous children's burials and grave sites were often marked with wooden crosses that were susceptible to rotting away).
It sounds like you have heard snippets about this but do not have the full story.
From CBC News:
Pine Creek Residential School "graves:" The sites of fourteen radar images were excavated. No remains, no graves.
Camsell Hospital "graves:" An excavation of 21 spots flagged by ground-penetrating radar only turned up debris. No remains, no graves.
After three years, dozens of cases of arson and vandalism at Catholic churches, and genuine national hysteria, no further excavations are scheduled.
Jonathan Kay at Quillette provides an excellent history of the Times' blatant misinformation:
When Will The New York Times Correct Its Flawed Reporting on ‘Unmarked Graves’? (paywalled)
Terry Glavin of Canada's National Post wrote a lengthy piece detailing the media's failings. It doesn't have all of the latest information but it gets the point across:
The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves (not paywalled)
If you are concerned about media bias and misinformation, this issue is a doozy. No one who reads the leading US newspapers and news magazines has a clue about this. It's journalistic malpractice, plain and simple. Even better, there is a bill proposed in Canada that would make "denialism" of these graves a crime.
I'm Canadian and I know quite a bit about this issue.
Kay's article was on the 215 "graves" in Kamloops. As I said, it has not been proven that these are graves; it may be that there are no children in the orchard.
"It's too strong to say that there is definitely not a wholly intact teacup orbiting the sun in between the orbits of Earth and Mars. We don't have a telescope with that level of granularity, it has not been proven there is no teacup there."
You don't get to say *anything* about any dead children in any orchard until you can prove they're there. Until then, it's all just bullshit.
A teacup, or any evidence of a teacup, has never been found in space. We know indigenous children were taken to residential schools. We know thousands of them died in residential schools. We know that, for budgetary reasons, the bodies of many of these children were not returned to their home and were buried on or by the residential school. We know that often wooden crosses were used to mark the graves which were susceptible to rotting away. Finally we know how many records were destroyed (not maliciously, it was just policy to do so). Given these facts, this is not a teacup-in-space situation; it would not be implausible if bodies were found in the orchard.
Kay wrote an article discussing the whole multi-year saga that grew from one location to thousands of "graves" all over Canada. More than one article actually. His critique goes well beyond the Kamloops claims, as does the work done by Terry Glavin at the National Post. I doubt that you are familiar with their work based on your remarks.
The pith and substance of that particular article was rebutting the NYT's false claim that 215 bodies had been discovered in Kamloops. He has written lots of other articles on other issues with other claims as well, as have Glavin.
If you subscribe to Blocked And Reported you can find my old comments talking about Glavin and Kay.
I once respected Taibbi but he's also descended into Shellenberger's style of conspiracy theory. His reporting on the Twitter files was an exercise in conspiracy theory. The Biden campaign *requested* that Twitter take down non-consensual nude photos of Hunter, and Twitter complied. Taibbi alludes to this as an example of Twitter censoring tweets at the behest of the US government. I say 'alludes' to, because in Tweeting about this, Taibbi *never mentioned* the subject matter of the tweets (nude photos of a non-consenting party).
In short, Taibbi left readers with the impression that the *government* was *forcing* Twitter to remove *legitimate* content. The reality is that *the Biden campaign* *requested* that Twitter remove *non-newsworthy content that violated its own terms of service*. You can watch Taibbi's pitiful rationalizations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a597e6Wv_xg&t=270s
Oh please. There's so much more to the “Twitter files” than Hunter nudes. Taibbi and others proved that at the government's behest, Twitter moderated into nonexistence tons of valid content, later found to be perfectly unobjectionable.
Yes, Twitter is a private company. But it’s basic constitutional law that the government can’t use third parties to violate the Constitution. The federal govt's “request” is a fist in a velvet glove, for tech media companies.
And I hope you’re not pinning your hopes for the free exchange of info on Renee DiResta, who wants to mandate algorithms to reward “accuracy, civility, and other values” and, presumably, punish their opposites. Civility, are you serious? And who determines accuracy—her?
Taibbi et al. performed a heroic service. (Bizarrely, for his efforts, he received an unprecedented house call by an IRS agent over years-old tax returns, on the very day he was testifying before Congress on what he and others discovered about govt interference in Twitter.)
Taibbi misrepresented the entire story. The moderation was done pursuant to Twitters' own terms of service. Taibbi claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory flagged 22 million tweets for deletion; they in fact flagged a few thousand for potential moderation. Watch him get his ass handed to him in the grilling by Mahdi Hasan - he admits to many of these basic errors. There's nothing heroic about incompetent journalism.
Jesse rejects Public's work as biased and unreliable based on a specific story and the difficult communication that followed. How does this principle apply elsewhere? Jesse would agree that the NYT and many other publications have published blatantly false content or committed lies of omission many times over. Does he have a blanket policy of claiming that these outlets are unreliable? Maybe he does. It certainly sounds like Shellenberger got too political with his claim because he is emotionally invested in combating Progressives. It also sounds like Jesse is upset and is trying to dig as big a hole as he can for Shellenberger. The irony is that both parties have maximalist takes because they are upset.
He said he doesn’t trust Shellenberger’s reporting. IIRC he’s said before it’s better to evaluate individual journalists’ credibility rather than entire publications.
The NYT and NPR are not just providing office space to reporters. The NYT is responsible for the news it prints. NPR is responsible for the stories it produces. Jesse knows this is true.
Is that what I'm saying? Maybe what I'm saying is that he should be criticizing this article instead of trying to bury the guy. The point about the NYT et al. is that they have done sloppy and dishonest work at a scale that boggles the mind, but Jesse is not trying to portray these outlets as worthless. Jesse complains about how awful Twitter is, and then he runs to Twitter before contacting Shellenberger for a comment. If you are going to make someone look bad, isn't it enough to do the work and let it speak for itself? Instead he needs to nudge everyone along to casting aspersions on the whole Shellenberger enterprise. Just not a fan of this, and I do think Jesse is a good journalist who has done a great service on the pediatric gender medicine front. Many of the comments here are excessively self-assured and dismissive about all sorts of things. There's nothing new there; it's the internet.
Fair enough! I don’t really think Jesse is responsible the comment section, though, and I also don’t really see a massive difference between this critique and tonnes of a other critiques he’s written about progressive journalism, save for the mea culpa about going to twitter first.
I used to read Public. I agree with almost all of their overarching ideas and I find them biased and unreliable. They are overly emotional, overly sensationalized, and never seem to let complications get in the way of a story they want to tell.
Michael Shellenberger is a conservative activist. Period. Which is fine, if that’s what he wants to be! It gets really annoying when these people - like a lot of The Free Press staff writers - *also* pull this smug “après moi, le déluge” crap. Which, yes, is an attitude that can also be found in the hallowed halls of many other publications. And smugness and rage-baiting are effective business models for media - no argument there. But please, Shellenberger et al., spare us the sanctimony and just be right-wing activists.
I think there is a very thin line between being a contrarian and being an asshole, and Shellenberger doesn't always walk it well.
Speaking of The Free Press, Bari Weiss has a hard time staying on the proper side of that line, as well; recently she took to her podcast to recite all of the most surface and conservative takes on the election result: The Democrats are smug elites, will they heed the wake-up call, blah blah. I think she feels so betrayed by the left that she's gone right without even realizing she has moved.
I mean, when the only demographic in which the DEMs improved their vote share is rich people, it's not hard to find some truth in the "smug elite" idea
Incumbent governments were falling all over the world, and the US was not above that. Biden had a bad approval rating, inflation was bothering people, and under those circumstances the Democrats were in a tough position.
I can't say that is The Correct Reason--there's a lot to consider--but in my view this fits the available evidence better than Democrats-have-lost-touch.
“Biden had a bad approval rating, inflation was bothering people, and under those circumstances the Democrats were in a tough position.”
This makes it sound like the Dems just passively and inexplicably found themselves disfavored. Inflation bothers people because it was an easily foreseeable consequence of the Biden administration’s economic policy. Biden had a bad approval rating because his policies are deeply unpopular. The Democrats are fully responsible for the tough position they were in, and they haven’t helped themselves in the aftermath by doubling down on calling everyone who didn’t vote for Harris racist, misogynist, and the rest of the standard slanders that used to scare people into silence & compliance but now, after so many years of hearing those accusations made in the worst possible faith, just go in one ear and out the other.
Yes there is absolutely truth to this, but they had an opportunity (belatedly, thanks for nothing Joe) to distance themselves from the mess they created by NOT running the incumbent and they went with his running mate who refused to criticize him.
I think there's a difference between "anti-left" and "right-wing." Shellenberger was anti-left. Quite possible he's merged into being simply right-wing.
This is key - if you read someone like Matt Yglesias, he’s pretty open with his criticism of both left excess in general and Democratic Party tactical blunders - while remaining pretty explicitly in the Democratic camp because he believes in basic principles of redistribution, personal autonomy as well as a progressive patriotic narrative of the American story.
Jesse, you are fair to Shellenberger. I too am happy to have contrarians in the media. But this crap drives me crazy. I had to turn away from his Twitter-files extravaganza, due to his blatant misunderstanding of censorship and the First Amendment. Then I looked Public and thought maybe he's not quite the quack I thought he was. Then he put out the (unfortunately named) WPATH files, which I found interesting and valid. It seems every time get tuned in (and excited by) some kind of heterodox thinker / writer they obliterate their own credibility with this kind of crap. You might be only writer in that category that has not disappointed me--- yet.
"blatant misunderstanding of censorship and the First Amendment"
Are you a scholar of Constitutional law? The First Amendment is being tested in new and novel ways by the government-NGO-tech company nexus. This thread seems to be populated by people quite willing to make definitive and extreme statements about many things.
Indeed. If the government wants to combat misinformation, they have many means of communication available to them to respond to incorrect information without suggesting that anyone should remove someone else's speech.
Scientists from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford were throttled and censored per government request to prevent them from sharing TRUE information that did not comport with the favored narratives regarding COVID. Government regulators have the ability to damage or destroy big tech platforms. I'd rather they didn't get in the business of deciding what it is we should and should not hear. As I said earlier, this is new territory for the First Amendment. The government is free to use their bully pulpit to promote their truth. Justice Ketanji Jackson appears to think that the bully pulpit refers to an ability to stop others from speaking. Would you like the Trump administration to pressure big tech to limit your speech? The Biden administration sent profanity-laced "requests" for censorship. We wouldn't know this if people like Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Weiss didn't stick their necks out to publish internal correspondence between tech and the government. Hamilton 68 and Russian interference? Again, you'd have no clue if you just read the NYT. Glenn Greenwald is another independent journalist that I don't always agree with, but he is doing us all a service by trying to shed light on power. People are people, and they will screw up.
> Scientists from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford were throttled and censored per government request to prevent them from sharing TRUE information that did not comport with the favored narratives regarding COVID.
I too can make stuff up. It's really fun and easy.
I find this really disappointing, he seemed pretty measured 5-10 years ago, and I thought San Fransicko was a worthwhile read. At the time, he seemed like the only person I could find talking about the problems in California’s major cities, and detailing how other countries approached solving similar issues in the past.
That's too bad. I think he generally does really excellent work, like the WPATH files and Apocalypse Now and San Fransicko. It does sound like the election outrage cycle made him rush in where he should've been a little more skeptical, and it's too bad he can't just say yeah, I messed this one up, my bad. I hope everyone will chill a little now that the election is over and the results are sinking in.
Agreed. Those 3 coverages supported my subscription to Public. But the grievance POV for so many stories made him increasingly difficult to read/comprehend.
That being said, I feel he still has excellent thoughts about energy and homelessness in CA. And that's a lot of lifting.
Yes to all the above. ‘The WPATH Files’ author is Mia Hughes, but MS had editorial control. I also really liked SF-Sicko. It’s the ‘hot takes’ that make him and others look so compromised and diminished — and narcissistic, as when every chink in the trans activist armor is claimed by MS as fallout from his ‘Files,’ when there are in fact too many other variables to count. Note to serious journalists: ix nay on the hot takes, or at least confine them to your opinions rather than presume to try a complicated legal case in a tweet. Good work, Jesse.
A Free Speech Activist should be criticizing the arcane (and stupid IMHO) "Equal Time" FCC regulations instead of citing them to threaten a broadcaster for engaging in free speech. Jesse shows that Shellenberger cited them incorrectly, but even if Shellenberger's legal interpretation was correct, why is he so eager to shut up SNL?
I say this even though I understand -- and kind of agree with -- Shellenberger's claim that the election was cathartic. I just hope that I don't need another catharsis, or something even stronger, 4 years from now.
It seems to me that most people get mad about the 'misinformation' they disagree with but tend to look the other way when it comes to stories they agree with (or want to be true). It's all confirmation bias, all the way down...
In May, a former colleague of Shellenberger’s published an article about changes that took place over the last twenty years: “Like Michael, I long ago left the progressive environmental echo chamber. But Michael has gone through a MAGA-tinted looking glass and now trafficks in deep state conspiracies about UFOs, January 6th, and social media censorship far nuttier and more extreme than anything that his former progressive allies could ever have conjured up.”
This kind of thing is about personality, not politics. And this sounds like a case of simple contrarianism: he probably was like this as a child, making wild pronouncements and then digging his foot in about them. It’s a trait that would have served him as well in the “progressive environmental echo chamber” as it now serves him in the MAGAsphere.
"he probably was like this as a child, making wild pronouncements and then digging his foot in about them."
This comment section is really something! Know-it-all claims, blanket statements, and now theorizing how Shellenberger behaved as a child! The original claim is that Shellenberger got too emotionally invested in an issue and made claims that were too extreme. Does anyone see the irony? Jesse, I blame you for this ;-)
“All of which means that if you’re a careful journalist, you might not want to automatically and immediately take everything he tweets about the election at face value.” -says the guy who liberally uses the labels far right and whacko for people who depart from his own world view.
Substack really sucks. They keep on inserting your other posts into the middle of this post and they are the same typeface so it looks like a new article has begun.
Can this be turned off, at least for people who pay?
It's been only a week since Trump won. I've read several good articles from leftists explaining the how left-wing radicalism lost the election. I knew that shortly we would start seeing articles like this, a soothing balm for liberals to assure them that people on the right are just as crazy as they are. There is a big difference though between people saying stupid things and actual censorship taking place (which I am absolutely against).
I went to college with Michael. When I was a first year, he was the head of CISLA: Committee In Solidarity with Latin America, a group I joined. His writing on nuclear power has been very helpful in overcoming my fears. The ebb and flow of political thought is, always, personal and rarely linear. Still, I find it difficult to track his current POV with the young man who passionately sided with the campesinos.
I have about the same trajectory. I figured out that leftism is about signaling and complaining and BEING THE ONES WHO CARE. It is hollow, concerns itself with no solutions, does performative stuff. It wasn't idealism, it was youthful arrogance. Sure, I wanted a better world but all I was doing was complaining. I am mostly embarrassed.
Good article. Randy Balko had a weird and unfair drive-by against Shellenberger and I defended Shellenberger because he was right and Balko was wrong. In this case it seems that Shellenberger got over his skis and should issue a correction to help his credibility.
you missed a great opportunity to open with something like “michael shellenberger thinks NBC broke the law by putting kamala on SNL before the election. but actually, he’s wrong.”
Watching Shellenberger's descent into conspiracy mania has been really disappointing, and it kind of reminds me of James Lindsay, who I also think used to be a pretty interesting guy.
I really enjoyed Shellenberger's reporting when he wrote "San Fransicko" and it influenced my subscription to Public. About a year ago I finally couldn't take the wild headlines anymore, but since I had already renewed for a full-year subscription, I spent the next 11 months not reading anything he published- my subscription finally expired last month.
I think he's another example of someone who was treated unfairly in circles he considered to be his 'people', and the stress of it totally tipped him over the edge. You hate to see it...
Completely agree, Christina. The personal resentment initially fuels legitimate grievances, than the ad revenue checks come and incentivize more and more illogical contrarianism and audience capture. There’s nothing journalistic or careful about the stuff that shellenberger, weinstein, peterson, etc. are doing these days.
The Heterodoxy -> Cancellation -> Derangement pipeline.
I had a similar experience with Freddie Deboer after he was really rude to subscribers in his substack comments section. This was long before Hamas attacked Israel. I had also done the annual subscription so I just waited it out.
I also subscribed to Shellenberger but stopped over UFO stuff. (I don't think that's a real thing.)
I disagree wildly with deBoer over many things, but some of his sentences are so gorgeous & so pellucid, that I just can’t bring myself to cancel.
He can be really rude, though; I knew that going in.
Freddie Deboer to me is like the left-wing version of Kevin Williamson. Both are people I don't agree with the majority of the time, but holy shit, they are mad talented at writing abrasive af essays that make you say "Well, to be honest, they have a point."
I could swear there was an essay where Kevin Williamson, who has major on-going beefs with Paul Krugman, points out that Krugman says something like "you know, you're one of the few people who calls to get a quote when you write an article about me."
I can't find it with google now, just them bitching at each other, so it's possible I have the polarities reversed or even the wrong writer. It might be a paywalled Ta-Nehisi Coates article.
I also took issue with Freddie Deboer’s egregious lack of editing to the point that several occasions made it difficult to read. I unsubscribed because I figured if he can’t bother to edit work at all, I can’t be bothered to pay.
Agree with every single word of this and have similarly been waiting for my subscription to expire. Conspiracy mania is a great description.
Thank you so much for having the courage to call this type of “journalism” out. There a lot of “Michael Shellenberger’s” running around in the “heterodox” social media space. They seem to have become drunk on their own internet fame, propelled by a shallow contrarianism that the masses are all too eager to lap up without question. Taibbi and Kirn aren’t too far behind…
Quite dismissive: "drunk on fame, shallow, the masses lap it up."
I take it you aren't one of the "masses." Are the masses everyone but you?
Read the Columbia Journalism review piece on the media and Russiagate. Consider the epic disaster that is the mainstream media's coverage of pediatric "gender medicine." Read Jonathan Kay's piece on the NYT and the fictitious dead children they created.
Criticize something that you believe is wrong, but keep your head about it. The people you listed have done the work that we used to expect the mainstream media to do. Without them, you'd have no idea what was going on.
I agree with you that some of those people have done some good work in the past. I don’t think that fact negates any of the concerns that Jesse presents in his piece, and I think those concerns apply to many of the most prominent alternative media space personalities.
The whole point I've been making is that people here are not just criticizing Shellenberger's piece on SNL. They are condemning him as an all-around hack and whacko. He has a long resume with plenty of good work. I think Jesse's critique of the SNL story is persuasive. I also think Jesse got riled up and overdid it.
> He has a long resume with plenty of good work
That's what makes his descent into crank-town so sad.
It's too strong to say "fictitious dead children". Rather, despite claims to the contrary, it was not proven that there were 215 dead children in an orchard in Kamloops. In the years since anomalies were found in Kamloops, there has been no excavation. If there ever is an excavation it may be that that the bodies of children will be found (in Canada's tragic residential school history, poor records were kept of indigenous children's burials and grave sites were often marked with wooden crosses that were susceptible to rotting away).
It sounds like you have heard snippets about this but do not have the full story.
From CBC News:
Pine Creek Residential School "graves:" The sites of fourteen radar images were excavated. No remains, no graves.
Camsell Hospital "graves:" An excavation of 21 spots flagged by ground-penetrating radar only turned up debris. No remains, no graves.
After three years, dozens of cases of arson and vandalism at Catholic churches, and genuine national hysteria, no further excavations are scheduled.
Jonathan Kay at Quillette provides an excellent history of the Times' blatant misinformation:
When Will The New York Times Correct Its Flawed Reporting on ‘Unmarked Graves’? (paywalled)
Terry Glavin of Canada's National Post wrote a lengthy piece detailing the media's failings. It doesn't have all of the latest information but it gets the point across:
The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves (not paywalled)
If you are concerned about media bias and misinformation, this issue is a doozy. No one who reads the leading US newspapers and news magazines has a clue about this. It's journalistic malpractice, plain and simple. Even better, there is a bill proposed in Canada that would make "denialism" of these graves a crime.
I'm Canadian and I know quite a bit about this issue.
Kay's article was on the 215 "graves" in Kamloops. As I said, it has not been proven that these are graves; it may be that there are no children in the orchard.
"It's too strong to say that there is definitely not a wholly intact teacup orbiting the sun in between the orbits of Earth and Mars. We don't have a telescope with that level of granularity, it has not been proven there is no teacup there."
You don't get to say *anything* about any dead children in any orchard until you can prove they're there. Until then, it's all just bullshit.
A teacup, or any evidence of a teacup, has never been found in space. We know indigenous children were taken to residential schools. We know thousands of them died in residential schools. We know that, for budgetary reasons, the bodies of many of these children were not returned to their home and were buried on or by the residential school. We know that often wooden crosses were used to mark the graves which were susceptible to rotting away. Finally we know how many records were destroyed (not maliciously, it was just policy to do so). Given these facts, this is not a teacup-in-space situation; it would not be implausible if bodies were found in the orchard.
But, as of yet, no bodies have been found.
Kay wrote an article discussing the whole multi-year saga that grew from one location to thousands of "graves" all over Canada. More than one article actually. His critique goes well beyond the Kamloops claims, as does the work done by Terry Glavin at the National Post. I doubt that you are familiar with their work based on your remarks.
The pith and substance of that particular article was rebutting the NYT's false claim that 215 bodies had been discovered in Kamloops. He has written lots of other articles on other issues with other claims as well, as have Glavin.
If you subscribe to Blocked And Reported you can find my old comments talking about Glavin and Kay.
What have Taibbi and Kern done wrong? (In terms of inaccurate journalism)
I once respected Taibbi but he's also descended into Shellenberger's style of conspiracy theory. His reporting on the Twitter files was an exercise in conspiracy theory. The Biden campaign *requested* that Twitter take down non-consensual nude photos of Hunter, and Twitter complied. Taibbi alludes to this as an example of Twitter censoring tweets at the behest of the US government. I say 'alludes' to, because in Tweeting about this, Taibbi *never mentioned* the subject matter of the tweets (nude photos of a non-consenting party).
In short, Taibbi left readers with the impression that the *government* was *forcing* Twitter to remove *legitimate* content. The reality is that *the Biden campaign* *requested* that Twitter remove *non-newsworthy content that violated its own terms of service*. You can watch Taibbi's pitiful rationalizations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a597e6Wv_xg&t=270s
Or check out Taibbi's conspiracy-addled claims, and utter lack of journalistic integrity, as he defames Renee Diresta: https://www.threads.net/@renee.diresta/post/C7SmBj0xTnD
Oh please. There's so much more to the “Twitter files” than Hunter nudes. Taibbi and others proved that at the government's behest, Twitter moderated into nonexistence tons of valid content, later found to be perfectly unobjectionable.
Yes, Twitter is a private company. But it’s basic constitutional law that the government can’t use third parties to violate the Constitution. The federal govt's “request” is a fist in a velvet glove, for tech media companies.
And I hope you’re not pinning your hopes for the free exchange of info on Renee DiResta, who wants to mandate algorithms to reward “accuracy, civility, and other values” and, presumably, punish their opposites. Civility, are you serious? And who determines accuracy—her?
Taibbi et al. performed a heroic service. (Bizarrely, for his efforts, he received an unprecedented house call by an IRS agent over years-old tax returns, on the very day he was testifying before Congress on what he and others discovered about govt interference in Twitter.)
Taibbi misrepresented the entire story. The moderation was done pursuant to Twitters' own terms of service. Taibbi claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory flagged 22 million tweets for deletion; they in fact flagged a few thousand for potential moderation. Watch him get his ass handed to him in the grilling by Mahdi Hasan - he admits to many of these basic errors. There's nothing heroic about incompetent journalism.
Jesse rejects Public's work as biased and unreliable based on a specific story and the difficult communication that followed. How does this principle apply elsewhere? Jesse would agree that the NYT and many other publications have published blatantly false content or committed lies of omission many times over. Does he have a blanket policy of claiming that these outlets are unreliable? Maybe he does. It certainly sounds like Shellenberger got too political with his claim because he is emotionally invested in combating Progressives. It also sounds like Jesse is upset and is trying to dig as big a hole as he can for Shellenberger. The irony is that both parties have maximalist takes because they are upset.
He said he doesn’t trust Shellenberger’s reporting. IIRC he’s said before it’s better to evaluate individual journalists’ credibility rather than entire publications.
The NYT and NPR are not just providing office space to reporters. The NYT is responsible for the news it prints. NPR is responsible for the stories it produces. Jesse knows this is true.
So you’re saying Jesse should disavow Public actually because they provided office space for bad journalism?
Is that what I'm saying? Maybe what I'm saying is that he should be criticizing this article instead of trying to bury the guy. The point about the NYT et al. is that they have done sloppy and dishonest work at a scale that boggles the mind, but Jesse is not trying to portray these outlets as worthless. Jesse complains about how awful Twitter is, and then he runs to Twitter before contacting Shellenberger for a comment. If you are going to make someone look bad, isn't it enough to do the work and let it speak for itself? Instead he needs to nudge everyone along to casting aspersions on the whole Shellenberger enterprise. Just not a fan of this, and I do think Jesse is a good journalist who has done a great service on the pediatric gender medicine front. Many of the comments here are excessively self-assured and dismissive about all sorts of things. There's nothing new there; it's the internet.
Fair enough! I don’t really think Jesse is responsible the comment section, though, and I also don’t really see a massive difference between this critique and tonnes of a other critiques he’s written about progressive journalism, save for the mea culpa about going to twitter first.
I used to read Public. I agree with almost all of their overarching ideas and I find them biased and unreliable. They are overly emotional, overly sensationalized, and never seem to let complications get in the way of a story they want to tell.
I got the same impression of Public. It was really disappointing.
"This was definitely wrong and you should have known it was definitely wrong before you published it" is not a "maximalist take", good god.
Michael Shellenberger is a conservative activist. Period. Which is fine, if that’s what he wants to be! It gets really annoying when these people - like a lot of The Free Press staff writers - *also* pull this smug “après moi, le déluge” crap. Which, yes, is an attitude that can also be found in the hallowed halls of many other publications. And smugness and rage-baiting are effective business models for media - no argument there. But please, Shellenberger et al., spare us the sanctimony and just be right-wing activists.
I think there is a very thin line between being a contrarian and being an asshole, and Shellenberger doesn't always walk it well.
Speaking of The Free Press, Bari Weiss has a hard time staying on the proper side of that line, as well; recently she took to her podcast to recite all of the most surface and conservative takes on the election result: The Democrats are smug elites, will they heed the wake-up call, blah blah. I think she feels so betrayed by the left that she's gone right without even realizing she has moved.
I mean, when the only demographic in which the DEMs improved their vote share is rich people, it's not hard to find some truth in the "smug elite" idea
"most surface and conservative takes"
So you have deep and liberal takes? A common Democratic take is that dumb racists were misinformed and voted wrong.
What is the sophisticated and correct reason that Democrats lost so badly against a terrible candidate like Trump?
Incumbent governments were falling all over the world, and the US was not above that. Biden had a bad approval rating, inflation was bothering people, and under those circumstances the Democrats were in a tough position.
I can't say that is The Correct Reason--there's a lot to consider--but in my view this fits the available evidence better than Democrats-have-lost-touch.
“Biden had a bad approval rating, inflation was bothering people, and under those circumstances the Democrats were in a tough position.”
This makes it sound like the Dems just passively and inexplicably found themselves disfavored. Inflation bothers people because it was an easily foreseeable consequence of the Biden administration’s economic policy. Biden had a bad approval rating because his policies are deeply unpopular. The Democrats are fully responsible for the tough position they were in, and they haven’t helped themselves in the aftermath by doubling down on calling everyone who didn’t vote for Harris racist, misogynist, and the rest of the standard slanders that used to scare people into silence & compliance but now, after so many years of hearing those accusations made in the worst possible faith, just go in one ear and out the other.
Well, as long as you can blame the Democrats, right?
For losing the election...? Yes...?
Why can't it be both? And other reasons as well? People aren't actually yet reducible to data points.
Yes there is absolutely truth to this, but they had an opportunity (belatedly, thanks for nothing Joe) to distance themselves from the mess they created by NOT running the incumbent and they went with his running mate who refused to criticize him.
Is it your self-appointed role to be the reflexive contrarian on this board? It's getting old.
I did not know you were in charge here. How many comments are we allowed to post? Do I run them by you first?
When the ratio of question marks to periods in a comment is greater than 1, you have clearly signaled that you're just JAQing off.
Shellenberger isn't a right-winger, at least not when I was still reading Public.
It's pretty clear he is now. Or at least in the Trump camp.
I think there's a difference between "anti-left" and "right-wing." Shellenberger was anti-left. Quite possible he's merged into being simply right-wing.
This is key - if you read someone like Matt Yglesias, he’s pretty open with his criticism of both left excess in general and Democratic Party tactical blunders - while remaining pretty explicitly in the Democratic camp because he believes in basic principles of redistribution, personal autonomy as well as a progressive patriotic narrative of the American story.
Jesse, you are fair to Shellenberger. I too am happy to have contrarians in the media. But this crap drives me crazy. I had to turn away from his Twitter-files extravaganza, due to his blatant misunderstanding of censorship and the First Amendment. Then I looked Public and thought maybe he's not quite the quack I thought he was. Then he put out the (unfortunately named) WPATH files, which I found interesting and valid. It seems every time get tuned in (and excited by) some kind of heterodox thinker / writer they obliterate their own credibility with this kind of crap. You might be only writer in that category that has not disappointed me--- yet.
"blatant misunderstanding of censorship and the First Amendment"
Are you a scholar of Constitutional law? The First Amendment is being tested in new and novel ways by the government-NGO-tech company nexus. This thread seems to be populated by people quite willing to make definitive and extreme statements about many things.
I am not a legal scholar, but I think I can definitely claim the word "request " and the word "demand" are not synonyms.
Yes, but when it’s the federal government “requesting” it can feel a lot like a demand.
Indeed. If the government wants to combat misinformation, they have many means of communication available to them to respond to incorrect information without suggesting that anyone should remove someone else's speech.
Twitter refused nearly all the requests though, so clearly it's not the same.
Scientists from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford were throttled and censored per government request to prevent them from sharing TRUE information that did not comport with the favored narratives regarding COVID. Government regulators have the ability to damage or destroy big tech platforms. I'd rather they didn't get in the business of deciding what it is we should and should not hear. As I said earlier, this is new territory for the First Amendment. The government is free to use their bully pulpit to promote their truth. Justice Ketanji Jackson appears to think that the bully pulpit refers to an ability to stop others from speaking. Would you like the Trump administration to pressure big tech to limit your speech? The Biden administration sent profanity-laced "requests" for censorship. We wouldn't know this if people like Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Weiss didn't stick their necks out to publish internal correspondence between tech and the government. Hamilton 68 and Russian interference? Again, you'd have no clue if you just read the NYT. Glenn Greenwald is another independent journalist that I don't always agree with, but he is doing us all a service by trying to shed light on power. People are people, and they will screw up.
> Scientists from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford were throttled and censored per government request to prevent them from sharing TRUE information that did not comport with the favored narratives regarding COVID.
I too can make stuff up. It's really fun and easy.
I find this really disappointing, he seemed pretty measured 5-10 years ago, and I thought San Fransicko was a worthwhile read. At the time, he seemed like the only person I could find talking about the problems in California’s major cities, and detailing how other countries approached solving similar issues in the past.
That's too bad. I think he generally does really excellent work, like the WPATH files and Apocalypse Now and San Fransicko. It does sound like the election outrage cycle made him rush in where he should've been a little more skeptical, and it's too bad he can't just say yeah, I messed this one up, my bad. I hope everyone will chill a little now that the election is over and the results are sinking in.
Agreed. Those 3 coverages supported my subscription to Public. But the grievance POV for so many stories made him increasingly difficult to read/comprehend.
That being said, I feel he still has excellent thoughts about energy and homelessness in CA. And that's a lot of lifting.
Yes to all the above. ‘The WPATH Files’ author is Mia Hughes, but MS had editorial control. I also really liked SF-Sicko. It’s the ‘hot takes’ that make him and others look so compromised and diminished — and narcissistic, as when every chink in the trans activist armor is claimed by MS as fallout from his ‘Files,’ when there are in fact too many other variables to count. Note to serious journalists: ix nay on the hot takes, or at least confine them to your opinions rather than presume to try a complicated legal case in a tweet. Good work, Jesse.
A Free Speech Activist should be criticizing the arcane (and stupid IMHO) "Equal Time" FCC regulations instead of citing them to threaten a broadcaster for engaging in free speech. Jesse shows that Shellenberger cited them incorrectly, but even if Shellenberger's legal interpretation was correct, why is he so eager to shut up SNL?
I say this even though I understand -- and kind of agree with -- Shellenberger's claim that the election was cathartic. I just hope that I don't need another catharsis, or something even stronger, 4 years from now.
It seems to me that most people get mad about the 'misinformation' they disagree with but tend to look the other way when it comes to stories they agree with (or want to be true). It's all confirmation bias, all the way down...
In May, a former colleague of Shellenberger’s published an article about changes that took place over the last twenty years: “Like Michael, I long ago left the progressive environmental echo chamber. But Michael has gone through a MAGA-tinted looking glass and now trafficks in deep state conspiracies about UFOs, January 6th, and social media censorship far nuttier and more extreme than anything that his former progressive allies could ever have conjured up.”
https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-20-spring-2024/michael-and-me
This kind of thing is about personality, not politics. And this sounds like a case of simple contrarianism: he probably was like this as a child, making wild pronouncements and then digging his foot in about them. It’s a trait that would have served him as well in the “progressive environmental echo chamber” as it now serves him in the MAGAsphere.
"he probably was like this as a child, making wild pronouncements and then digging his foot in about them."
This comment section is really something! Know-it-all claims, blanket statements, and now theorizing how Shellenberger behaved as a child! The original claim is that Shellenberger got too emotionally invested in an issue and made claims that were too extreme. Does anyone see the irony? Jesse, I blame you for this ;-)
Can we refrain from Freudian analysis of the childhood of people about whom we are entirely ignorant?
Nothing Freudian about it. He has a personality trait that I noted. That’s all.
“All of which means that if you’re a careful journalist, you might not want to automatically and immediately take everything he tweets about the election at face value.” -says the guy who liberally uses the labels far right and whacko for people who depart from his own world view.
Substack really sucks. They keep on inserting your other posts into the middle of this post and they are the same typeface so it looks like a new article has begun.
Can this be turned off, at least for people who pay?
My original comment was going to be "ha ha ha, they made up an opponent called Hung Cao on SNL"
It's been only a week since Trump won. I've read several good articles from leftists explaining the how left-wing radicalism lost the election. I knew that shortly we would start seeing articles like this, a soothing balm for liberals to assure them that people on the right are just as crazy as they are. There is a big difference though between people saying stupid things and actual censorship taking place (which I am absolutely against).
I went to college with Michael. When I was a first year, he was the head of CISLA: Committee In Solidarity with Latin America, a group I joined. His writing on nuclear power has been very helpful in overcoming my fears. The ebb and flow of political thought is, always, personal and rarely linear. Still, I find it difficult to track his current POV with the young man who passionately sided with the campesinos.
I have about the same trajectory. I figured out that leftism is about signaling and complaining and BEING THE ONES WHO CARE. It is hollow, concerns itself with no solutions, does performative stuff. It wasn't idealism, it was youthful arrogance. Sure, I wanted a better world but all I was doing was complaining. I am mostly embarrassed.
Good article. Randy Balko had a weird and unfair drive-by against Shellenberger and I defended Shellenberger because he was right and Balko was wrong. In this case it seems that Shellenberger got over his skis and should issue a correction to help his credibility.
you missed a great opportunity to open with something like “michael shellenberger thinks NBC broke the law by putting kamala on SNL before the election. but actually, he’s wrong.”