As I said to journalist Eoin Higgins at one point during our recent conversation, in this case the call is coming from inside the house. I didn’t just mean that one journalist was interviewing another — about a book that is, itself, largely about the world of journalism — although that’s true enough. Or even that three articles that originally appeared in Salon (by way of Higgins’ previous gig at the Institute of Public Accuracy) now appear in his new book, "Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left," although that’s true too. (One such Salon article is linked below.)
What I meant was that Higgins and I (who have never met in person, for the record) feel uncomfortably close in some ways to the subject of his book, which tells the story of how the semi-legendary crusading journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi gradually drifted toward the MAGA-friendly right, and made lots of money in doing so. It’s not just the story of two cantankerous dudes becoming far more cantankerous — although, as Higgins himself suggests, that’s undeniably part of the story — but it’s also not some MSNBC propaganda narrative about dissident left-wingers actually being paid shills for Russia (as has been suggested, I believe, about both of those guys).
Where the discomfort comes in is that Higgins and I are both precisely the kind of civil-libertarian leftists who agreed, to a significant degree, with the scathing criticisms that Greenwald and Taibbi (among others) directed at the liberal-Democratic consensus during the Obama years and the first Trump term. Higgins was a friend and admirer of Greenwald’s in particular; I knew Greenwald less well (although I was a staff writer for Salon when he was a columnist here) but have defended his prickly perspective on several occasions and have avoided criticizing him in print. Neither of us knew Taibbi well, but his ferocious reporting on the George W. Bush administration and the financial crisis of 2008, for Rolling Stone and elsewhere, created a reputation that has now diminished nearly all the way to nothing.
Once it became impossible to follow these two into the lucrative tech-bro spaces of Substack and the so-called intellectual dark web — where they joined other media refugees like former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss — the painful question emerged of what had happened and why. Some answers were entirely too obvious (ka-ching); others seemed too painful.
Greenwald became a regular guest on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show during its latter months on the air; Taibbi wrote up the "Twitter Files," apparently convincing himself that a trove of internal corporate records personally curated and delivered by Elon Musk somehow qualified as a scoop. As Higgins tells the story in “Owned,” which at times feels like one of those thrillers where you can’t quite work out who the good guys are, all of this was part of a much larger pattern — a campaign by some of the richest men in the world to control the flow of information, especially when it was about them. With Donald Trump back in the White House and Musk apparently in control of the federal workforce, a sinister new chapter appears to have begun. Let’s let Eoin Higgins take it from here.
This interview transcript has been edited for clarity and length: For instance, I’ve placed our discussion of Substack at the top even though it occurred toward the end of our conversation.
Substack plays an important role in this story, and even to media professionals its appearance and prominence over the past few years were startling and unexpected. So tell us how that platform came into being and what it represents in your book.
Sure. Substack is a newsletter service. It was started, I think. in 2017. It's basically, like, a successor to Blogspot. It's where people can write whatever they want. And in this case, it has a great UX system. It looks great. It has streamlined subscription and revenue generation. It's a very slick, very good product. In 2019, I believe, tech billionaire Marc Andreessen led a funding round and put a lot of money into it. With that money, Substack was able to start giving paid deals to writers to entice them from their jobs, to come over to Substack and write there. Effectively, what happened is that they peeled off some mainstream writers, and they started to find that the politics of the people there began to tilt right, especially on some socially conservative topics like trans rights, which has been kind of the big one.
I see the transphobia stuff as part of the story, but the bigger part of the story is the peeling off of these established writers from the publications that they wrote for previously, which devalues the publications with their departure. It decentralizes media in a way that is not inherently negative in a vacuum, but when it's being pushed by someone like Andreessen — someone who does not like the media, because the media can be critical of him — you have to wonder what the reasoning is. I believe that was the reason: an attempt to decentralize the media and kind of break it down.
Right. So just to summarize that briefly, it was both an attempt to foreground more right-wing voices, accidentally or otherwise, and an attempt to disempower or undercut more traditional forms of media.
Yeah, I mean, that's totally my belief.
Well, here you are, Eoin, with this book about this Big Tech attack on media hitting less than a month into the second Trump administration. You couldn't have planned that any better. Did you actually predict all this?
Honestly, no. When Bold Type Books pitched me on doing this, they said, we want someone to write about Glenn and Matt, and you've been suggested by a number of people as the right person to do this. I was like, yes, of course, but I would also like to make it about how tech billionaires were investing all this money into alternative media. Not alternative media like Salon, but alternative media like Substack and Callin and and all this stuff, in order to create a media ecosystem that favored them, one that would act almost like a PR arm for them.
At the time, it wasn’t that explicit, but I said, I would also like to dig into these guys, I want to talk about where the money is coming from. They were like, yeah, that sounds great. So I wrote it pretty quickly, and we were going through the editing process. The draft was done in February 2024, and I was like, let's try and get it out before the election. They were like, OK, that’s not going to happen. That's not how publishing works.
I complained about that, but they convinced me that this was the right way to go. So we set the publishing date, and Joe Biden was still the nominee. Then, when Kamala Harris came in, I was like, this is good for the world, but not necessarily good for my book, right? [Laughter.]
I was really involved with pushing for an earlier date, and it turned out that I was completely wrong. I should have listened to them in the first place. I felt like there was no way that Trump would get elected again. I just didn't think there was any way that people would want to do that again. I think I just misjudged how bad things had been during Biden. I had a massive blind spot there.
So now the book is coming out — and look at what Elon Musk is doing, look at the Peter Thiel stuff. The tech stuff has started to become more important than the media stuff, although I think it’s really important to understand the media stuff, the information ecosystem that these people have created around them. So this is hitting at this time where, you know, a lefty, independent book focused on media criticism probably would not have the same buzz.
Yeah, and you somewhat anticipate my next question. Why write a book about two journalists who, as famous or notorious as they may be in our profession, are not widely known to the general public? The answer, in some ways, is that that’s not what your book is really about. But I’d like to hear your answer.
Well, I think that Glenn and Matt are well known to a certain age cohort. I think people who were in college between about 2005 to 2015 definitely know who these guys are. Not because of their Twitter accounts and their punditry, but because of the work they did. Specifically, I mean, Glenn's reporting on Edward Snowden, that was world-changing stuff. That’s in the history books forever. No matter what else he ever does, he's always going to be known for that. It’s not a footnote.
Matt Taibbi is less prominent, but certainly people who were in school or who were young in general during the financial crisis are aware of him. I have a lot of friends who are apolitical, you know, working people who don't have the same deranged interest in politics that I do, right? They’re just not interested. But they know who these guys are.
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that.
Well, because they're my age, they're in their mid 40s, right? Writing a book about the tech takeover of media — I mean, you could sell that book now, but when I was contracted to do this, there wasn't the same huge interest in it. So using the journeys of these two people who are highly influential was a good way of exploring the themes around tech and control of information in the media. So I would gently push back on the idea that they're not that well known, but maybe the point you're getting at is that they are not nearly so influential now, right? And that's definitely true.
Their influence was starting to wane a little when I started to write the book, but I've been surprised by how far they've fallen off the radar, over the last year-plus. With Taibbi, the big thing was the "Twitter Files." He got some headlines out of that, but people aren't really paying a lot of attention to him anymore. Glenn is siloed off on Rumble, which is good for him money-wise, but his audience has to be shrinking at this point. I mean, there's not a lot of people who are interested in that platform. I don't want to say he doesn't have a large audience, but it’s no longer a hugely influential audience. I think The Intercept needed him. That’s undeniable, if you look at the way things have gone for them since he left. But the reverse is also true. He needed them as well, and I think they both are worse off now.
Yeah, I agree with most of that. I definitely agree with you on Greenwald's importance when it comes to the Snowden revelations, and that speaks to why you were the person to write this book. If you understand the metaphor, the call is coming from inside the house, right? You understand the worldview that these guys, at least at one time, appeared to represent. You’re not coming at them from the outside, from an MSNBC perspective or a mainstream Democratic perspective. You’re not going to accuse them of being Russian agents. You’re more closely aligned with these guys than a lot of their critics would be.
Yeah. I mean, totally. When I was in college — I went to college late — that was when Glenn had just started to write for Salon. And, like, immediately, he was speaking to me, I was a fan. And my good friend in college, who I used to talk about this stuff with a lot, he felt the same way about Taibbi. I was totally locked in. I think I describe myself in the book as a civil libertarian leftist, and I still am. The specifics of my political belief system are based in my reaction to the War on Terror under George W. Bush. For someone like that, for someone with my views, who better to express that, at that time, than a polemicist like Glenn Greenwald, who was able to put that stuff into words and take the fight to the people who were spreading the mainstream message of war and authoritarianism?
Your book strikes me, in a way, as a companion piece to Spencer Ackerman’s "Reign of Terror," which is probably the best single work on how the post-9/11 era and the War on Terror changed this country. Do you agree with that?
If you're gonna say that my book is a companion to Spencer's, that's a huge compliment. Yeah, a lot of the front half of the book is my response to the War on Terror, which was what Glenn was addressing at the time. I’m obviously not neutral, right? I'm being very clear that I agree with him. I still agree with him about a lot of this stuff.
There's a moment, and this is quoting Glenn, when he’s talking about how his friendship with Rachel Maddow fell apart, and he says, "I thought we believed the same things, and then she just became this establishment voice for this kind of state power, War on Terror stuff, as long as as it was the Democrats doing it." I think there's a lot of truth to that. I understand that frustration, just as I understand Matt’s frustration in "Hate Inc." when he talks about how Maddow and MSNBC are damaging to their audiences.
But where they both start to lose me is that if you're going to say that MSNBC is as damaging as Fox, I'm going to need to see more evidence for that. Because with Fox, I mean, it’s about the audience. If you're radicalizing the audience of Fox News, the results are going to be a lot worse than if you radicalize a liberal audience, quite frankly. So if you line those two up and make a parallel comparison, the way that Taibbi does explicitly in “Hate Inc.,” and like both Glenn and Matt did for a long time — before they both came to this conclusion that, actually, the big problem is the Democrats — I think you're kind of playing yourself at that point. You’re not really thinking clearly.
It was almost painful to me to read those early sections of your book, because the critique that both of those guys, and especially Glenn, have offered about mainstream Democrats capitulating to certain ideas about state power and mass surveillance — I mean, that's all true, right? I imagine you and I are in accord on that. And the unanswerable question that I have is, OK, if you make that critique, where does the loss of perspective come in? How do you decide that the enemy of your enemy has to be your friend now, and that somehow the Republican side is less guilty of, you know, truly noxious things? I don't get that part at all.
Yeah, I don't know how that really happens. I mean, I can talk about how I see it happening, and I will. But I think there's a more interesting question that you're asking, which is, like, how does that happen psychologically, right? My answer to that is also, I don't know. I wish I knew, because I can kind of lay out the facts on what happened.
With Glenn, I see somebody who aligned himself with liberals during the the latter Bush years and made a career for himself doing this, pushing back on the civil-liberties infringements and the authoritarianism of the Bush regime. Then he watched liberals, over eight years, just abandon all of that because of their partisan affiliation with Barack Obama. OK, so I'm with him on that 100 percent. Like, there's no question. That’s why, in most of my political writing, I'm so harsh on Democrats, because I just don't care about Republicans. I think they're a lost cause. I don't care, right? I mean, they can cause a lot of damage. They matter in that way, and should be criticized in that way. But I'm not criticizing them, because I don't expect anything else.
And then Trump becomes president. I don’t think Glenn was a supporter of his, right? But what he didn't like, which was the same as me and the same as almost everybody I quote in the book favorably, was the Democrats becoming obsessed with Russia and refusing to address any of the things that got us the point where Trump got elected in the first place. They squandered two-plus years where they could have been fighting back against the Trump agenda on, you know, conspiracy theories and pretending that there was some vast overseas plot to overthrow the U.S. That was a massive, massive mistake. That was a disaster.
But Glenn took this and instead of having it become, hey, let's continue to resist state power irrespective of who's in power, he became completely obsessed with Democrats and liberals and the way that they were responding. He’s always had some right-winger to him, you know, some conservative beliefs. That's very American of him. Most Americans aren't one or the other, right? That's fine. But he basically decided that liberals were the problem, and I think the attention that he got from that, and the way that he got flattered and worked by the alt-right media machine, including Tucker Carlson and Fox News, and then the tech guys, I think that just solidified it. And then when he found that there was an opportunity, he took it.
Meaning an opportunity to go to an independent platform — Substack, in this case — and make a lot of money doing so?
Yeah. I feel like that had been building for a while, and when it happened, it wasn't super surprising. Even then, I held out some hope. You know, I was still friendly with him on a superficial online level. But he just went too far in a direction that I couldn't follow, and then I started to see him as this character who was more interested in his own advancement than in any of the principles that he had built his career on. Maybe I was finally seeing him for who he really was, you know? A lot of people would probably argue that.
As far as Taibbi goes, I mean, he also rejected the Russiagate stuff in probably harsher terms than Glenn did, which earned him a lot of anger from liberals. Then the #metoo scandal hit [regarding allegations from Taibbi's earlier career in Russia] and I think he just slowly drifted to the right. You know, I think he was always regarded with suspicion by some people on the left. Liberals were eager to have a reason to be done with him anyway. So that was kind of a perfect storm and by 2020, COVID kind of drove him insane. Maybe that happened before COVID, but now the stuff he's saying, it's just completely out to lunch. He's just an anti-vax conspiracy theorist. He seems to be really flailing, trying to find any kind of audience that he can at this point, like with the “Twitter Files.” He obviously thought that was going to be his noted moment, and it just didn't hit.
That was so lame. I don't know how somebody who worked as a professional journalist for so long could think that was really going to work, or could fail to understand that he was being played, or was willfully playing himself.
No, I don't either. I've always maintained that while there wasn't much in there that was earth-shattering, it was really interesting to see how they made decisions. But it's not world-changing reporting, and then when you find out that Elon Musk cherry-picked this stuff, and there was other stuff Matt couldn't look at. I think it just wasn't there. That was another disappointment in a career that had increasingly become about disappointment. And you know, then the right was willing to support him and be friendly to him, so he just embraced their beliefs.
One thing your book winds up being about, maybe by accident, is the importance of ideology. You make the argument that neither of these guys was strongly motivated by ideology. Maybe Greenwald had an ideology, kind of, and people interpreted it in different ways at different times. But I think we can say that neither of these guys was a committed leftist for ideological reasons. I’m not the kind of person who thinks that's the most important thing in life, and I bet you’re not either. But that’s part of the story here, right?
Yeah. I mean, as it turned out, Glenn didn't really believe in a lot. I think he is committed to the cause of Palestine, or at least committed against Israel. I don't know if that's because of deep belief, but I don't see any reason to read him in bad faith on that. Similarly, I don't know if his belief in free speech is based on a belief that everybody should have the right to speak, or if he just likes fighting for people whose speech is seen as repulsive. But, you know, his rants are pretty fungible. He's very happy to turn on people and say the opposite thing that he said a few months or a year ago. I think he's just kind of self interested.
As far as Taibbi goes, I mean, I say this in the book, but they’re both Gen X, right? Like, they just have this kind of nihilism. Yeah, I can say that, because I'm on the cusp. [Laughter.] I'm not a millennial talking about Gen X from afar. I don’t want to make it sound totally self-important, but I do think there is something that's kind of nihilistic: “Don’t sell out, man,” even as you're selling out. That kind of thing.
There's a quote by Glenn in the epilogue. I gave him a whole block quote because I just thought it was so interesting. He was describing Taibbi, but he was kind of describing himself too, talking about getting more conservative as you get older. I really thought that was kind of a perfect way to describe a lot of what happened.
When I was reading over the transcript, I was like, if this was just some guy, a lawyer or whoever, who had the same politics Glenn had during the Bush administration and was now in his mid-50s, who hadn’t had this history of being a big-time journalist and writing books that sold hundreds of thousands of copies — if this was just some guy saying this, it makes sense. You get more conservative as you get older, and maybe you decide that liberalism has gone too far once it starts to annoy you to the point that you start feeling uncomfortable. You know, there's nothing particularly unique about that. I think that does have something. I don't think it's everything. I think it’s something.
It's definitely something. Any final words?
What I would like your readers to do, whether they are fans of Glenn from his days at Salon or after, or they are opponents of Glenn and Matt, whichever they are, I invite them to come into this with an open mind. I have a defined point of view that I think comes through in this book, but I also pride myself on being as fair as possible. Matt wouldn’t talk to me, but I gave Glenn every opportunity to push back on what people are saying. I don’t know whether Glenn comes off well, but we spoke for nearly three hours, and you definitely get his side of the story.
