Matt Taibbi has noticed considerable criticism about news reporters moving to Substack. The criticism is that they are functionally stealing the cred they earned within news organizations, where there are purportedly “standards” to keep the news proper, but then are jumping onto their own pirate ships where they can capriciously follow their whims. A recent critic is “UCLA professor Sarah Roberts, co-leader of something called the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry — media critics whose stated goal is “strengthening democracy through culture-making.” She tweeted that these actions by Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and other prominent reporters who have made this leap are  “dangerous.”

Taibbi responded at length from TK News, his Substack account. Here’s an excerpt:

[T]he new “norms” in the business have disincentivized traditional outlets to care about accuracy, leading to huge quantities of mistakes. When news agencies see their jobs as being primarily about politics, they become more concerned with being directionally right than technically accurate, knowing among other things that their audiences will forgive them for being wrong, so long as they’re wrong about the “right” targets.

As a result, many reporters by last summer found themselves navigating newsrooms where they were being discouraged, sometimes openly, from pursuing true stories with the “wrong” message — the health impacts of the BLM protests, speech controversies in science and media, follow-up news about once-bombshells like the Cambridge Analytica scandal or “Bountygate.” Many of those people weren’t politically conservative at all (in fact, often quite the opposite). They’d just been trained to do the job in a more dispassionate way, and were being pushed by an increasingly monolithic newsroom culture to run with simplistic, hot-taking versions of the news (as one reporter put it, describing the BLM protests, “I’m sympathetic, but every story had to be Viva la revolución”). The choice for many of these people was to go along, or get out, and where a lot of them got out was to Substack.