Matt Taibbi's lawsuit is stupid and embarrassing
The liberal-turned-conservative pundit's century of humiliation continues.
Conservative journalist Matt Taibbi has filed a defamation lawsuit against Eoin Higgins over his book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. I am sorely tempted to file and amicus brief in support of Higgins, in part because I think Taibbi is being a bully and I hate bullies, and in part because I have a stake in this myself. I have written a lot over the years about the various conflicts of interest that pundits like Taibbi are entangled in — in fact, Higgins cites my work in his book — so a bad ruling in the case would set a pretty grim precedent for writers like me.
For now, however, I’ll just lay out my immediate impressions of the case.
Taibbi’s basic complaint is that Higgins has accused him “of corruption, dishonesty, and unethical conduct in his profession” with “reckless disregard for the truth.” It mostly grounds this argument in a few key phrases from the text: Higgins says that Taibbi is “owned,” that he was “bought,” that he “cashed in,” that he received a “windfall,” and so on. Read narrowly, these quotes can be interpreted as making various factual claims that Taibbi denies, or that Higgins at least is in no position to prove.
Even read narrowly, some of Taibbi’s allegations are (generously) misreads, if not outright misrepresentations. For example, at one point the complaint insists that Taibbi’s
income did not “explode” during the Twitter Files project as alleged.
Since the complaint is poorly footnoted it is hard to say where this quote comes from, but it certainly doesn’t appear in Owned. The closest thing to it is a passage where Higgins writes that Taibbi’s
Substack exploded after the Twitter Files reporting…Musk’s threatening that subscription growth was the real danger.
This is not a claim that Taibbi’s income exploded — it’s a claim that his subscription growth exploded. That is an important distinction and one which suggests, contra Taibbi, that Higgins is not acting “with reckless disregard for the truth.” Subscriptions are valuable because they can lead to income, but they are not the same as income, and it’s just not accurate to pretend he meant on when he said the other.
More often, Taibbi’s complaint relies on readings of the text that are just implausibly narrow. It argues for example that it is false for the subtitle of Owned to suggest that Taibbi “was ‘bought’ by billionaires.” Their objection to this claim:
When podcaster Andrew Keen said… “You are alleging there is a deal” and asked Higgins to explain it, Higgins said that in Plaintiff’s case, it was not a deal but an “implicit understanding,” in which a source wouldn’t have to tell a reporter, “Hey we need you to spin this in this way” because “they would just know,” as in “you do this and you get benefit.”
Two simple problems with this objection:
It simply is not the case that “bought” must be narrowly read as denoting an explicit deal rather than an implicit quid pro quo. All you have to do is look at Taibbi’s own writing to find him uncritically using the term in precisely the same way Higgins uses it. When for example he writes that Trump “talked about exported jobs, soaring drug costs, and the conspiracy of bought-off pols in both parties who made these problems possible,” this paraphrase is not of Trump alleging an explicit deal. On the contrary, Trump’s argument in 2016 was clear: other politicians were “all paid off by campaign contributions,” which of course usually rely on quid pro quos that are implicit.
In the quoted passage above Taibbi’s complaint uses Eoin’s own words to prove that he is committing defamation — but doesn’t this actually prove the exact opposite? This is not some private communication that they somehow intercepted; this is Eoin publicly and of his own volition making it clear that he is not alleging an explicit quid pro quo. To give “bought” the narrow defamatory reading Taibbi gives it you have to remove this context; but the courts have ruled the one has to consider “either the full context of the communication in which the statement appears or the broader social context and surrounding circumstances”.
Whatever the legal merits of this case, Taibbi’s own rationalizations for bringing it are patently nonsensical. On Twitter for example he been making arguments like this:
How is saying someone “sold out” any more or less a factual claim than saying someone has been “bought”? Both refer directly to some kind of transactional arrangement which either did or did not take place. Even if Taibbi’s lawyers end up making a winning argument, it seems perfectly clear that Taibbi himself has utterly confused and hypocritical ideas about its merits.
And that, I think, is the most damning aspect of this whole affair. Whether Taibbi wins or loses, his incoherent rationalizations for this complaint make it very difficult to see this as a principled defense of free speech — or as anything other than a pathetic SLAPP suit. It’s an embarrassing low-point to a career that was already widely regarded as compromised well before Higgins wrote Owned.
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