A Rolling Stone political writer and author urged his audience Monday night to look at the story underneath the story when receiving news from the American media.
Journalist, blogger, author and one-time professional basketball player in Mongolia, Matt Taibbi, spoke at the Memorial Union Theater as a part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.
Taibbi said in an interview with The Badger Herald Americans are trained to believe the news they read and see on TV is objective and balanced, but he said in reality there is always subtext and different agendas behind every story.
“You just have to learn to think of news outlets as companies and commercial organizations that have agendas, and that’s not necessarily an evil thing that they have something they want you to believe,” Taibbi said. “But they do, and you have to be aware of that …problems come when people aren’t aware of the propaganda.”
He added the American people need to educate themselves to see what their preferred news outlets’ agendas are.
University of Wisconsin Junior Angelica Engel agreed with Taibbi that people need to be better educated but added it is hard to do with the limited amount of time people have in their days.
Taibbi said he has had a long and strange career, especially considering the last thing he wanted to be in college was a journalist.
“I basically spent all my time [in college] getting stoned and watching Ren and Stimpy cartoons….Its funny when I think back at what my plan was at the time,” Taibbi said. “I honestly thought I would be able to sleep till noon everyday and then get up in the afternoon and write novels and make millions of dollars.”
After studying abroad in Russia for his last two years of college and deciding to stay after graduating, Taibbi said he quickly ran out of money and had to fall back on journalism to support himself.
After obtaining a job writing stories about Russia in the 1990s, Taibbi said he became disillusioned with the way the American press was covering the country’s transition from communism to capitalism.
He said the wire services did not want to run stories about increased crime and drug use in the country, but instead he had to cover stories about gorillas in a zoo in St. Petersburg, Russia, that were eating bananas for the first time because the country was now more open to the outside world.
The experience opened Taibbi’s eyes to how the American media’s agenda of wanting to portray Russia’s conversion to capitalism as positive was shaping what kind of news was covered.
Taibbi said he brought this disillusionment with him when he returned to the U.S and began to work on the 2004 presidential campaign where he was struck by the stupidity of American politics. He added he struggled with finding the deeper meaning underneath the stupidity.
Taibbi said he believes he has found this meaning as he has been covering and researching the financial crises for his latest book.
“There has to be a deeper more complex reality, and I never really knew what that was and finally when I was put onto this finance story that’s where it is, America is a giant massive industrial empire, and there is no reason it should have simplistic politics,” Taibbi said. ”
