Ken Silverstein is that rare thing in the world of today’s journalism: an old-school muckraker. A longtime investigative reporter, he has covered everything from international arms dealers to political corruption to the activities of intelligence services for outlets like Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Intercept and the Nation, among others. I caught up with him to discuss the elections from the rare point of view of an expert on money in politics; however, the conversation soon morphed into a meditation on journalism and the untold history of the last few decades as seen by one of America’s most astute observers. One of the themes that consistently emerges whenever you talk to Silverstein is that democracy and journalism in America are deeply intertwined—and that both are in a state far lousier nowadays than most respectable writers are willing to admit, no matter who wins at the polls this week. The interview was conducted over the course of several Zoom calls and has been significantly condensed and edited for clarity.
—John Michael Colón
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John Michael Colón: There’s a book by Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, that basically argues that politics in a liberal democracy like the United States is less about who votes for which candidate than it is about which specific moneyed interests decide which particular candidates are even on the ballot line to vote for in the first place. And he says that you can much more readily understand the history of the United States in terms of those financial flows into both the major parties, than through the surface-level story of struggles between different politicians. Do you think the Thomas Ferguson theory is right? Are politicians more responsive to their funders than to voters?
Ken Silverstein: I mean, it’s not even debatable. It’s completely correct. You’d have to be completely blind not to see it. I just recently saw the annual Economist rankings as to the quality of various countries’ democracies—all according to the enlightened experts. And as of this year the U.S. isn’t even considered a full democracy; they placed it in a lower category than a number of Western European countries, Iceland and so on, and even, I believe, Costa Rica. Well, of course. The idea that we live in a democracy—I’m sorry, I’m not just saying this to be provocative, but it’s just outlandish.
There are a number of factors that make the United States something much less than a fully functioning democracy. Just take the electoral college. And all the rules the two parties have created have completely eliminated the possibility of a third party emerging. There’s all the gerrymandering by both parties, all the voter suppression in recent years by the right.
But the biggest and most obvious strike against the United States as a democracy is the rule of money. It’s out of control, and it’s indisputable that it’s completely corrupted the U.S. political system.
JMC: You are something of an expert on money in politics. Your work for places like Harper’s as well as in your Substack Washington Babylon is full of well-sourced portraits and sketches of the various oligarchical factions operating behind the curtain of electoral politics, the sort of people who provide campaign financing and even ideological talking points to the politicians of both parties. How did you get on this beat in the first place?
KS: I’d always been interested in politics. I graduated in the early 1980s from Evergreen State College. That’s where I discovered the great journalist Alexander Cockburn, reading his Village Voice columns in college. He’s the guy who inspired me to get into politics and journalism.
Look, if you’re not deeply immersed in mainstream culture and media, so completely immersed in the muck that you can’t see anywhere beyond it, then you’ll recognize the centrality of money. Unfortunately a lot of people are immersed. Mainstream journalists, so many of them, can be so incapable of recognizing what’s so obvious because they themselves are part of the elite—people have a hard time being self-aware and self-critical. But I got interested because I moved to D.C. and, well, give me a break. It’s the old cliché: follow the money. Money is it. Money is in everything.
It becomes very, very obvious to anyone with a brain who lives in this city for some amount of time, as it became obvious to me, that that’s what drives the political system. And it’s gotten worse over time. I moved here in ’93; this was before the series of Supreme Court decisions under Roberts that completely discarded and eroded and did away with any of the limits that had ever been placed on money in politics.
JMC: I imagine some readers will be skeptical. Surely it can’t all be about money?
KS: It’s all like this, all of journalism and politics. It’s how you end up with a whole political system where you can’t even run for office—certainly not the presidency, but you can’t run for Senate anymore either, or the House in most states—and expect to win without raising a pile of money. And who are you going to get it from? Sure, there’s the small donors, absolutely. But it’s very, very difficult to get elected that way. Look at Cori Bush. Okay, she raised money—but she got outspent dramatically by the AIPAC crowd, and she was out. So in all but a very few cases, if you’re not doing what the rich and the most deep-pocketed donors want, you can’t raise the money. And even if you do manage to raise cash from small donors—Bernie Sanders did a good job, for instance—there’s no guarantee. You might get sabotaged by the party at the behest of the donor class; you might lose fair and square; and no matter what, the big money will always line up against you. And Bernie, or AOC, these aren’t radical socialist politicians, not really. But that’s as far left as it gets in this system.
I’ll mention a story I wrote for Harper’s about Obama in 2006 that I think really gets the question you asked. He hadn’t officially announced, but it was obvious he would: here he was, a rising star, the one-term senator from Illinois. And all you had to do was look at his campaign finance reports to see that his money came from big finance and energy interests as well as Vernon Jordan types—you know, the sleazy former government officials turned lobbyists who are so often the power brokers of the Democratic Party. These are the people who backed Clinton, too, who allowed for the corporate capture of the Democratic Party and the eradication of its New Deal wing. Obama could never have run for office had he not been vetted by this donor class. He wouldn’t have had a prayer had he not curried favor with, auditioned with and catered to them. And ultimately that’s what he did. Anyone who’d followed the money could’ve predicted it from the start.
JMC: We find ourselves in the last stretch of an election that many observers characterize as decisive for the future of democracy. If the real forces behind any election are always these networks you’ve described that exist behind the curtain, which forces are behind the candidates in this election? Who are they, and what do they actually want?
KS: It’s been absolutely shocking to me, even though I’m an extremely cynical person, to watch what’s happened to the GOP. I have sources and friends from what amounts to the far left to what would’ve been considered until recently the hard right. And a lot of the people in the latter category, what we would’ve called hardcore conservatives, would never vote for Trump. Just look at his movement: Mike Lindell, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani—I mean, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
It’s hard to evaluate the scope of the threat. You look at their plans and statements. Are they indeed hoping to impose some awful outcomes, to pass laws and rules that dramatically alter the state of U.S. democracy, which is already in bad shape, and make it infinitely worse? I think they are, absolutely. Will they be able to? I don’t know. But I think it’s important for people to know—even people who despise the Democrats, like I do—that there is a group of people behind Trump who are quite scary, you know?
JMC: One very interesting indicator of just how scary they are, but also how difficult it is to know how seriously to take them, is your recent New Republic exposé of Erik Prince’s group chat. Could you explain who Erik Prince is and what the story is behind these leaked conversations?
KS: Erik Prince is the founder of Blackwater, which is sort of the original giant private military company of the turn of the century that imploded after its employees conducted a massacre in Iraq, among various other abuses. He’s very well connected in MAGA world—he’s buddies with Trump and is one of these infinitely wealthy political donors with a lot of influence in right-wing circles.
I got leaked the names and the contents of what until then had been Prince and his friends’ secret WhatsApp group chat. A lot of them were people the public wouldn’t necessarily have heard of: an Israeli intelligence official, a onetime bodyguard of Henry Kissinger, black-market arms traffickers, a U.S. Army guy who’d done psyops in Central America in the Eighties, and so on. But there were some pretty big names in it besides Prince: Tucker Carlson, for example, and former Lt. General Michael Flynn, and Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee. And as you might imagine, they were talking the way you and I might do in private, if we were sitting around in a bar and everything we said weren’t about to be published. So because of that, they really said some fairly outlandish and scary things—mostly about their contempt and hatred for ordinary people, their disapproval of democracy as a political arrangement, their desire to violently round up their enemies in the U.S. and abroad, and so on.
The group chat had this one guy, Sven von Storch, a German aristocrat whose family moved to Chile after the Nazis lost World War II, and who himself married the granddaughter of the finance minister Hitler personally appointed. Today the von Storches are leaders in the AfD, the openly far-right party in Germany that stirs up hatred against immigrants, claiming to want to preserve Germany’s Western heritage—they’re doing quite well in the polls, by the way.
So these are people who literally hate democracy—and if they can get away with it, they’ll extinguish it. They’re influential people, in politics and business and the military bureaucracy, and they’re going to be empowered and emboldened if Trump wins office. It’s disturbing to hear people like that just openly discuss the things they want to do: summary tribunals for Democrats, that sort of thing. I hate Democrats, but I’m sorry, I don’t want to see that sort of thing for people just because you disagree with their politics, you know?
JMC: But what do the donors want? I’m thinking of the people behind the Trump movement that seems to have taken over the GOP, which nowadays is generally associated with a few oligarch names. Peter Thiel, for instance, the PayPal baron and CIA contractor who has gained infamy in recent years for his open rejection of democracy and funding of far-right intellectuals and (until recently) candidates. Or the Mercer family, who may have begun to support Trump again after a few years’ distance and once cultivated assets all over the place in MAGA land. And then of course there’s Elon Musk, whose main contributions have characteristically taken the form of questionably legal money giveaways to voters, spreading false rumors about the election and funding contradictory ads with dueling propaganda lines to pit different ethnic groups against Harris and one another. What do these folks think they can get out of Trump, or Vance, or any of the various people they back?
KS: On one level, they’re not terribly different in what they want from any of the Democrats’ top oligarch donors—Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist of LinkedIn, for example. Part of what they want is the same old thing as always: the most favorable rules that allow their businesses to accumulate as much money as possible, because they are the lords of the land. I mean, it may increase pollution and kill people, but whatever—worst case, they’ll be living in their underground bunkers.
But there’s also something different. The Republican oligarchs have a more and more explicitly anti-democratic side—they’re not even democrats in the sense of believers in democracy as a political system. The Democrats are enemies of democracy, too, objectively speaking; they’re still constantly passing pro-business rules that erase democracy at the grassroots and collaborating with Republicans to do horrible things. On Israel, for instance. But they’re not psychotic in the same way.
I kept thinking about this passage from Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts as I wrote the Prince group-chat story, where it quotes some embassy guy in Berlin writing back to the State Department in Washington in the 1930s and saying, basically, that in normal times, much of the leadership of the Nazi government would be confined against their will in psych wards. A lot of things in society have to have failed for them to be this close to power. Voters turn to people like this only after a lot of bullshit. Which is also why you can’t romanticize the Democratic Party. If they hadn’t run such a clearly unpopular and unsalvageable candidate in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, there would’ve been no Trump presidency. And they almost made the same mistake again in 2024. Joe Biden seemed cognitively impaired in a serious way, and until the very last second they were going to run him. We’ll see soon whether the late-game switcheroo salvaged them.
JMC: For me the really interesting and horrifying thing about Biden’s brief candidacy was how, right up until the catastrophic debate—where it just became transparently clear and undeniable that his mental capacities are significantly compromised by his age, that he really is a sort of American Brezhnev—most of the journalists in most of the broadsheet papers and respectable magazines and televised news networks of this country were still gaslighting us. What is it that causes journalists to so often simply regurgitate the talking points of the powerful?
KS: It’s hard to say. It can be difficult to tell when people are knowingly lying, versus just being deluded. Most of the Washington media elites are Democrats, and there’s nothing wrong with that, in principle. People believe what they’re going to believe. The trouble begins with the ignorant and stupid view—which, I’m sorry, but it really is one of the most idiotic myths of American journalism—that we aren’t allowed to have a viewpoint because we have to be objective. Give me a break: you can’t be a political reporter and not have political ideas, political beliefs. It’s asinine. You just have to be honest and open about them, so the audience knows where you’re coming from. And then from there you try your best to make sense of what the hell is going on.
Nobody’s objective. As human beings, we’re incapable of it. I’ve had journalists come and tell me, “Ken, I can’t vote, it would compromise my editorial independence.” So you have a candidate you do support, but not by exercising your constitutional right to vote for them? And you think this protects something important? If you’ve been a political reporter for two years, five years, ten or even twenty years, and you haven’t come to any conclusions after all that time spent observing politics—well, that’s very sad.
Janet Malcolm is one of my favorite writers of all time. She said two things about this that I think are extraordinarily important for journalists to know. One is, “We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up.” And the second, which is a variation on that theme, is:
We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly. When, occasionally—and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressure of external events—we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm.
For me, if you don’t know that in your bones, and adjust yourself accordingly as a writer and an observer of the human species, then you’re not a reporter. In fact you’re incapable of doing reporting of any serious nature. Being ignorant of your own biases, or lying to yourself about them, is very dangerous.
JMC: It’s almost like knowing what bias you’re inevitably coming from might help you identify the moments when the truth contradicts that bias.
KS: Yes. What year was it that Dukakis got creamed by Bush the Elder—1988? I was living in New York at the time, and I remember telling people, “Look, I know what the polls are saying, but I really think Dukakis is gonna win, because nobody I talk to says they’re gonna vote for Bush.” You’ve got to be capable of realizing when you’re talking to your own bubble and get out of that.
I know now my views aren’t popular in this country. If somebody with my views ran for office, they’d get dusted. You have to be aware of these things, I think, and adjust your evaluation of other people accordingly. I try to. But most Washington reporters don’t.
JMC: One of the remarkable things about your work is its wide historical perspective, even when you’re writing about the present. You have a really admirable grasp of the long-term evolution of journalism in this country. Can you take us through some of the highlights of that history, and what it means for the situation we confront today?
KS: Well, in the early years of the American republic, when political parties directly financed newspapers, you had captured media outlets that were little more than tools of political parties. Each party had its paper and they all toed their respective party line.
Eventually, by the start of the 1900s or so, you had an evolution to a different financial model based on making the newspaper more of an independent business funded by advertisers—that’s the origins of the penny press—think of William Randolph Hearst. It became profit-driven; they tried, primarily, to make money rather than promote a viewpoint.
They also lowered the price, which made it accessible to more people. For the first time newspapers started catering to the working class. Not always in a good way, of course. There was the tabloid stuff, the sensational reporting. It’s not a great model to be dependent on advertisers, to be honest. Because that’s corrupting too, in its own way.
They’d take pains never to piss off the advertisers. And they often became more interested in newsstand sales than quality—hence all the bad reporting on dumb subjects, instead of consistently focusing on the most serious issues. Plus, newspapers maintained some of their old bias. Especially the fancier, more expensive broadsheets that eventually evolved out of ad and subscription models. Everyone knew the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post each had a slight slant. But it was clubby. They were vehicles for elites to talk to each other.
That’s the way it remained for a long time. What I see as the high point of journalism, which was also the high point of American democracy in general, was the 1960s and Seventies. You had the hippies and the left-wing movements in broader society, and in journalism that manifested itself as the turn to hard-hitting investigations. It was the era of Woodward and Bernstein—well, more Bernstein really, Woodward is overrated in my opinion. He’s horrible now, he’s just like a stenographer. But anyway, the crusading, heroic investigative reporter became very popular with Watergate. And that, I think, is what produced the counterrevolution that sent everything down the tubes.
JMC: The neoliberal turn, you mean?
KS: Things turn to shit around 1974, in my opinion. I’m sure you’ve heard of the famous memo by Lewis Powell, who later went on to become a Supreme Court justice. It’s very telling. He’s writing to his friend at the Chamber of Commerce and saying, Look, we’ve gotta do something, business is getting thrashed, the hippies are taking over. That was the definitive moment. American intervention in the Vietnam War had come to an end, Nixon had been driven from office by public protest, and there was a palpable fear among the ruling class. Because there is a ruling class, it’s not some crazy left-wing term—the ruling class knew itself to be just that, and in that moment it was petrified, so it came together just as ruling classes always do in the end. They united to protect their interests, because after all they benefit the most from the current arrangement—that’s the main constant in the history of American capitalism.
You know, there are conspiracies, John. One can be overly conspiratorial and believe, like some MAGA people do, that the deep state is controlling the weather—all sorts of lunacy. But conspiracies happen all the time around the world. They happen because small groups of people do come together to protect their interests. And it happened in the United States in the early 1970s.
It would’ve been funny, honestly, that they were so scared of a socialist revolution, except that it prompted them to do something that ended very badly for the rest of us. They came together and they said, We have to check the power of the left in the university and in the media, we need to squeeze the workers. And so any dreams of reindustrialization gave way to neoliberalism. The modern lobbying industry was born in this era, the Heritage Foundation and all the big think tanks were born in this era, all the privatization and deregulation properly got underway in this era. It was a conscious conspiracy, if you will, to roll back the democratic gains of the 1930s and 1960s.
Including in the media. Katharine Graham—publisher and chairwoman of the Washington Post, where the Watergate story had broken—gave a famous speech in 1974 just a few months after Nixon resigned, about how we, the investigative journalists, “have gone too far.” You know, for investigating powerful people and corruption. There can be no more of that. So there was a lot less of that, for the most part. That was the dark moment when we lost.
JMC: How does “follow the money” apply to journalists themselves?
KS: One way is to buy think tanks, which they do all the time. The same people who are buying politicians are buying the think tanks, as well as, you know, creating various kinds of nonprofit groups that might appear independent, but are in fact created to promote a particular point of view.
Then there’s the art of planting stories. The best book I’ll never write (probably) is on corporate intelligence. Some oligarch will pay these corporate intelligence companies in Washington vast sums of money, and what they’ll do is send out a report to the media. And look, reporters are overworked, okay? A lot of them would like to do a better job, but they can’t, they don’t have the damn time, and they just need to feed the beast. No time for investigative stories, that’s for sure. So what the journalists will do is that they’ll hire these firms, and in return the firms will send them these memos, these reports.
Even if you go yourself to interview the people mentioned as sources in the memo, they’ll often tell you the same thing they told the corporate intelligence firm, because that firm was hired to produce a narrative that serves the interest of some oligarch.
JMC: Despite all this venality and corruption in the media environment of the early 21st century, you did nevertheless find a niche for yourself. And you broke some pretty amazing stories—there was that international arms dealing story in Harper’s, and you were at the forefront of investigations into the Clinton Foundation’s various corrupt dealings. What kind of opportunities existed in those days for people who wanted to keep up the proud tradition of investigative journalism?
KS: I was hired at the Los Angeles Times’s Washington, D.C. investigative unit in 2002 and worked there for four years. It was alright for a while.
Back then I would raise the money from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, or some other nonprofit or foundation, for stories I wanted to do that were investigative and might not have a broad enough appeal for a magazine to commission and pay for them; but if I got the funding, then I could always find an outlet to publish it, because they were good stories. It’s never easy to find $15,000 for an investigative piece. I also was on staff at Harper’s for eight or nine years. And those were good years—I could do pretty much anything I wanted. I traveled all over the world, and if I had a good story, I’d eventually find somebody to finance it.
But that was an exception. And it ended, eventually, because the industry collapsed. It’s the familiar story: Craigslist, free news, the failure to anticipate the internet was going to destroy the basis of the ad revenue and paid subscriber models. There are fewer jobs, and the industry keeps shrinking. The number of jobs that all a sudden just disappeared was extraordinary across the industry. You had a classic reserve army of labor, the Marxian concept—you know, all of us got thrown out. I jokingly like to say we journalists are the chimney sweeps of the 21st century. Our job came to be considered redundant, so we were made redundant as well.
JMC: So if some young writer wanted to follow your same path today, could they?
KS: No—and I can’t follow it either! The change happened quick, and a lot of the old opportunities were gone. Suddenly I couldn’t make any money. By 2016 I realized I was never going to be able to support myself as an independent journalist, as a freelancer. And then suddenly I was trapped. All I’d done in the past—being outspoken, not being a suck-up to the powerful or to one side or another—would make it impossible for me to ever get a job again, which is what happened.
JMC: But alongside this material shift you’re describing, journalism underwent something of a cultural shift as well, particularly around 2016, which seems like a key fulcrum point, marking the end of one journalistic era and the beginning of another.
KS: Yeah—it wasn’t just conditions in the industry. It was Trump. After he got elected in 2016 people talked about Trump Derangement Syndrome—how liberals lost their mind—and there’s absolutely some truth to that. But ultimately the cultural shift had more to do with the return of extreme partisanship. It was a return to those early days of the republic I mentioned, when newspapers were controlled by political factions. It’s not that the commercial or financial aspect disappeared entirely. Some places still worry about pissing off advertisers, or subscribers.
But then there’s the political issues. I know immediately if I see a story now, just from the venue or the author, what it’s going to say, who’s the target, who benefits from it: you’ve got crap like Newsmax and Fox, and you’ve got garbage like Occupy Democrats and MSNBC—and all their equivalents in print. We’ve returned to a system where liberal outlets are reluctant to write anything critical of the Democratic Party, and right-wing places absolutely will never criticize Trump. The general public, the political establishment, the media—across the board, the country has become much more polarized.
I don’t want to blame the public entirely. But the public has a role, because people do want their views reinforced. It’s scary and disturbing to me. My view is that living in a bubble is boring. It makes your life boring and dull. And I like to talk to people with opposing viewpoints. I don’t have to agree all the time, but I learn stuff. That view is less and less common nowadays.
JMC: One media take of yours that might come as a surprise to some readers, given your openly left-wing politics and your investigative bent, is your critique of the Intercept. Some years ago in Politico you called it “where journalism goes to die”—or at least, that’s the headline they gave you. You’ve been very critical of some Intercept journalists since then, too, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although you’ve also talked about your sympathies with and affection for other reporters who are still there. For you, what’s the problem with that milieu?
KS: To be clear, there’s a lot of brilliant people at the Intercept whom I greatly respect. In fact, there are parts of that article that I regret. But there are some critiques that I still stand by. Especially regarding the billionaire funder, Pierre Omidyar. The least objectionable reason oligarchs buy news outlets is to stroke their ego. My attitude is that the owners of a news outfit should stay the hell out of the newsroom. But Omidyar was all over the newsroom. He clearly wanted an outlet that would to an extent reflect his political viewpoint.
When I came into that place I thought Greenwald was great. Once I got to seeing how the sausage was made, it was not real inspiring. I remember seeing one story Greenwald wrote about Saudi Arabia, I think it was. The whole thing was based on real reporting by BuzzFeed and Politico, sprinkled with Glenn’s commentary, as if he himself had done a story. And that’s what Glenn does: he doesn’t really report or investigate. He’s a pundit.
There’s something you have to understand about him, to help you evaluate his journalism and to see why he took the turn he did. And that is that he started out as a defense attorney. That’s huge—because it’s an awful preparation for being a journalist, to be a defense attorney or a prosecutor. You’ve got a client, and all you care about is defending them no matter what. So he’s tremendously good at building a case that seems to be very shrewdly constructed. You come away from his stories thinking he’s really nailed it. And then you realize: wait a second, I haven’t heard from the prosecutor, not one quote from the other side. Because if he were a real journalist, sure he’d have a view and an angle, but he’d quote from and represent all sides, even if he himself sides with one over the other. You never see that in Glenn because he stacks the deck.
JMC: And if the client, so to speak, changes, then reality distorts in order to fit that new worldview.
KS: Exactly. He did some good work at first. But Glenn picks and chooses. I believe he slants his stories, which are always designed to go after someone he doesn’t like to the exclusion of everything else. And he won’t do that to his friends. That, to me, crosses a line.
JMC: And what about Taibbi? What’s his deal?
KS: Taibbi is different, and way more complicated. I think a big part of what drove him at first was just a basic level of immaturity in his reaction to the way he’d been criticized by his former allies on the left. He’d been criticized before the Twitter Files, for various reasons. And instead of examining the possibility that they might have had a point, doing a little reflection, he doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down.
JMC: Do you have any advice for journalists who want to avoid the sort of pitfalls you’ve talked about in this conversation—being an establishment stenographer like Woodward, or an ex-counterculture sellout like Taibbi and Greenwald?
KS: I mean, look, we’re all flawed, and probably deeply flawed—I’d very much include myself here. We’re imperfect people. That means if you’re going to be in journalism, you have to at least try to maintain some journalistic standards. And by that I absolutely don’t mean being “fair and balanced,” because there’s really no such thing. It’s being honest.
That means that if your reporting ends up not confirming what you initially set out to report—probably because of whatever political sympathies or alignments you have—you go through with it anyway. I know, it’s awkward to tell an editor, “I pitched you a story, it’s wrong.” But it doesn’t matter. You need to make sure your reporting always sustains the work you produce. It’s easier to do what Greenwald does and build a case. That’s way easier to do than journalism. I’ve been misled by sources and slow to figure it out. I’ve looked back at things I published and realized I was wrong after the fact. But I can honestly say that I try. I’m aware of my biases, and I try to fix my mistakes, even when it’s inconvenient.
Periodically somebody will bring me a story, bring me documents, and the overwhelming temptation is to think it’s a slam dunk. But once you start looking into things, life is more complicated. That’s not to say there’s no such thing as right or wrong, or that every truth lies in the middle. But usually there’s some evidence you have to evaluate that doesn’t support your point, if you’re doing it honestly. And who wants to do that? Way easier to just throw it out, pretend you didn’t see it. That’s how you end up writing a story where all the facts are true, but the story is a lie. That doesn’t mean I’ve ever set out to write a story about someone corrupt only to find they’re a saint. But it’s always good to talk to people from all perspectives, not only as a journalist, but as a human being.
Be independent. Go after the bastards, if you get a good scoop and you can prove it. But don’t hesitate to go after your own side, too, if they deserve it. In the context of U.S. politics, Bernie Sanders is pretty great. I don’t worship him, though I do think he’s probably a force for good. But if somebody brought me a killer story on him, something shocking or dark that I could actually prove, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s how you win readers’ trust that you’re trying your best to tell the truth. Over the years I’ve developed a reputation as a lefty reporter who sometimes goes after my own side. And yeah, you’ve gotta do it. Otherwise you’re just a hack.
Ken Silverstein is that rare thing in the world of today’s journalism: an old-school muckraker. A longtime investigative reporter, he has covered everything from international arms dealers to political corruption to the activities of intelligence services for outlets like Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Intercept and the Nation, among others. I caught up with him to discuss the elections from the rare point of view of an expert on money in politics; however, the conversation soon morphed into a meditation on journalism and the untold history of the last few decades as seen by one of America’s most astute observers. One of the themes that consistently emerges whenever you talk to Silverstein is that democracy and journalism in America are deeply intertwined—and that both are in a state far lousier nowadays than most respectable writers are willing to admit, no matter who wins at the polls this week. The interview was conducted over the course of several Zoom calls and has been significantly condensed and edited for clarity.
—John Michael Colón
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John Michael Colón: There’s a book by Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, that basically argues that politics in a liberal democracy like the United States is less about who votes for which candidate than it is about which specific moneyed interests decide which particular candidates are even on the ballot line to vote for in the first place. And he says that you can much more readily understand the history of the United States in terms of those financial flows into both the major parties, than through the surface-level story of struggles between different politicians. Do you think the Thomas Ferguson theory is right? Are politicians more responsive to their funders than to voters?
Ken Silverstein: I mean, it’s not even debatable. It’s completely correct. You’d have to be completely blind not to see it. I just recently saw the annual Economist rankings as to the quality of various countries’ democracies—all according to the enlightened experts. And as of this year the U.S. isn’t even considered a full democracy; they placed it in a lower category than a number of Western European countries, Iceland and so on, and even, I believe, Costa Rica. Well, of course. The idea that we live in a democracy—I’m sorry, I’m not just saying this to be provocative, but it’s just outlandish.
There are a number of factors that make the United States something much less than a fully functioning democracy. Just take the electoral college. And all the rules the two parties have created have completely eliminated the possibility of a third party emerging. There’s all the gerrymandering by both parties, all the voter suppression in recent years by the right.
But the biggest and most obvious strike against the United States as a democracy is the rule of money. It’s out of control, and it’s indisputable that it’s completely corrupted the U.S. political system.
JMC: You are something of an expert on money in politics. Your work for places like Harper’s as well as in your Substack Washington Babylon is full of well-sourced portraits and sketches of the various oligarchical factions operating behind the curtain of electoral politics, the sort of people who provide campaign financing and even ideological talking points to the politicians of both parties. How did you get on this beat in the first place?
KS: I’d always been interested in politics. I graduated in the early 1980s from Evergreen State College. That’s where I discovered the great journalist Alexander Cockburn, reading his Village Voice columns in college. He’s the guy who inspired me to get into politics and journalism.
Look, if you’re not deeply immersed in mainstream culture and media, so completely immersed in the muck that you can’t see anywhere beyond it, then you’ll recognize the centrality of money. Unfortunately a lot of people are immersed. Mainstream journalists, so many of them, can be so incapable of recognizing what’s so obvious because they themselves are part of the elite—people have a hard time being self-aware and self-critical. But I got interested because I moved to D.C. and, well, give me a break. It’s the old cliché: follow the money. Money is it. Money is in everything.
It becomes very, very obvious to anyone with a brain who lives in this city for some amount of time, as it became obvious to me, that that’s what drives the political system. And it’s gotten worse over time. I moved here in ’93; this was before the series of Supreme Court decisions under Roberts that completely discarded and eroded and did away with any of the limits that had ever been placed on money in politics.
JMC: I imagine some readers will be skeptical. Surely it can’t all be about money?
KS: It’s all like this, all of journalism and politics. It’s how you end up with a whole political system where you can’t even run for office—certainly not the presidency, but you can’t run for Senate anymore either, or the House in most states—and expect to win without raising a pile of money. And who are you going to get it from? Sure, there’s the small donors, absolutely. But it’s very, very difficult to get elected that way. Look at Cori Bush. Okay, she raised money—but she got outspent dramatically by the AIPAC crowd, and she was out. So in all but a very few cases, if you’re not doing what the rich and the most deep-pocketed donors want, you can’t raise the money. And even if you do manage to raise cash from small donors—Bernie Sanders did a good job, for instance—there’s no guarantee. You might get sabotaged by the party at the behest of the donor class; you might lose fair and square; and no matter what, the big money will always line up against you. And Bernie, or AOC, these aren’t radical socialist politicians, not really. But that’s as far left as it gets in this system.
I’ll mention a story I wrote for Harper’s about Obama in 2006 that I think really gets the question you asked. He hadn’t officially announced, but it was obvious he would: here he was, a rising star, the one-term senator from Illinois. And all you had to do was look at his campaign finance reports to see that his money came from big finance and energy interests as well as Vernon Jordan types—you know, the sleazy former government officials turned lobbyists who are so often the power brokers of the Democratic Party. These are the people who backed Clinton, too, who allowed for the corporate capture of the Democratic Party and the eradication of its New Deal wing. Obama could never have run for office had he not been vetted by this donor class. He wouldn’t have had a prayer had he not curried favor with, auditioned with and catered to them. And ultimately that’s what he did. Anyone who’d followed the money could’ve predicted it from the start.
JMC: We find ourselves in the last stretch of an election that many observers characterize as decisive for the future of democracy. If the real forces behind any election are always these networks you’ve described that exist behind the curtain, which forces are behind the candidates in this election? Who are they, and what do they actually want?
KS: It’s been absolutely shocking to me, even though I’m an extremely cynical person, to watch what’s happened to the GOP. I have sources and friends from what amounts to the far left to what would’ve been considered until recently the hard right. And a lot of the people in the latter category, what we would’ve called hardcore conservatives, would never vote for Trump. Just look at his movement: Mike Lindell, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani—I mean, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
It’s hard to evaluate the scope of the threat. You look at their plans and statements. Are they indeed hoping to impose some awful outcomes, to pass laws and rules that dramatically alter the state of U.S. democracy, which is already in bad shape, and make it infinitely worse? I think they are, absolutely. Will they be able to? I don’t know. But I think it’s important for people to know—even people who despise the Democrats, like I do—that there is a group of people behind Trump who are quite scary, you know?
JMC: One very interesting indicator of just how scary they are, but also how difficult it is to know how seriously to take them, is your recent New Republic exposé of Erik Prince’s group chat. Could you explain who Erik Prince is and what the story is behind these leaked conversations?
KS: Erik Prince is the founder of Blackwater, which is sort of the original giant private military company of the turn of the century that imploded after its employees conducted a massacre in Iraq, among various other abuses. He’s very well connected in MAGA world—he’s buddies with Trump and is one of these infinitely wealthy political donors with a lot of influence in right-wing circles.
I got leaked the names and the contents of what until then had been Prince and his friends’ secret WhatsApp group chat. A lot of them were people the public wouldn’t necessarily have heard of: an Israeli intelligence official, a onetime bodyguard of Henry Kissinger, black-market arms traffickers, a U.S. Army guy who’d done psyops in Central America in the Eighties, and so on. But there were some pretty big names in it besides Prince: Tucker Carlson, for example, and former Lt. General Michael Flynn, and Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee. And as you might imagine, they were talking the way you and I might do in private, if we were sitting around in a bar and everything we said weren’t about to be published. So because of that, they really said some fairly outlandish and scary things—mostly about their contempt and hatred for ordinary people, their disapproval of democracy as a political arrangement, their desire to violently round up their enemies in the U.S. and abroad, and so on.
The group chat had this one guy, Sven von Storch, a German aristocrat whose family moved to Chile after the Nazis lost World War II, and who himself married the granddaughter of the finance minister Hitler personally appointed. Today the von Storches are leaders in the AfD, the openly far-right party in Germany that stirs up hatred against immigrants, claiming to want to preserve Germany’s Western heritage—they’re doing quite well in the polls, by the way.
So these are people who literally hate democracy—and if they can get away with it, they’ll extinguish it. They’re influential people, in politics and business and the military bureaucracy, and they’re going to be empowered and emboldened if Trump wins office. It’s disturbing to hear people like that just openly discuss the things they want to do: summary tribunals for Democrats, that sort of thing. I hate Democrats, but I’m sorry, I don’t want to see that sort of thing for people just because you disagree with their politics, you know?
JMC: But what do the donors want? I’m thinking of the people behind the Trump movement that seems to have taken over the GOP, which nowadays is generally associated with a few oligarch names. Peter Thiel, for instance, the PayPal baron and CIA contractor who has gained infamy in recent years for his open rejection of democracy and funding of far-right intellectuals and (until recently) candidates. Or the Mercer family, who may have begun to support Trump again after a few years’ distance and once cultivated assets all over the place in MAGA land. And then of course there’s Elon Musk, whose main contributions have characteristically taken the form of questionably legal money giveaways to voters, spreading false rumors about the election and funding contradictory ads with dueling propaganda lines to pit different ethnic groups against Harris and one another. What do these folks think they can get out of Trump, or Vance, or any of the various people they back?
KS: On one level, they’re not terribly different in what they want from any of the Democrats’ top oligarch donors—Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist of LinkedIn, for example. Part of what they want is the same old thing as always: the most favorable rules that allow their businesses to accumulate as much money as possible, because they are the lords of the land. I mean, it may increase pollution and kill people, but whatever—worst case, they’ll be living in their underground bunkers.
But there’s also something different. The Republican oligarchs have a more and more explicitly anti-democratic side—they’re not even democrats in the sense of believers in democracy as a political system. The Democrats are enemies of democracy, too, objectively speaking; they’re still constantly passing pro-business rules that erase democracy at the grassroots and collaborating with Republicans to do horrible things. On Israel, for instance. But they’re not psychotic in the same way.
I kept thinking about this passage from Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts as I wrote the Prince group-chat story, where it quotes some embassy guy in Berlin writing back to the State Department in Washington in the 1930s and saying, basically, that in normal times, much of the leadership of the Nazi government would be confined against their will in psych wards. A lot of things in society have to have failed for them to be this close to power. Voters turn to people like this only after a lot of bullshit. Which is also why you can’t romanticize the Democratic Party. If they hadn’t run such a clearly unpopular and unsalvageable candidate in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, there would’ve been no Trump presidency. And they almost made the same mistake again in 2024. Joe Biden seemed cognitively impaired in a serious way, and until the very last second they were going to run him. We’ll see soon whether the late-game switcheroo salvaged them.
JMC: For me the really interesting and horrifying thing about Biden’s brief candidacy was how, right up until the catastrophic debate—where it just became transparently clear and undeniable that his mental capacities are significantly compromised by his age, that he really is a sort of American Brezhnev—most of the journalists in most of the broadsheet papers and respectable magazines and televised news networks of this country were still gaslighting us. What is it that causes journalists to so often simply regurgitate the talking points of the powerful?
KS: It’s hard to say. It can be difficult to tell when people are knowingly lying, versus just being deluded. Most of the Washington media elites are Democrats, and there’s nothing wrong with that, in principle. People believe what they’re going to believe. The trouble begins with the ignorant and stupid view—which, I’m sorry, but it really is one of the most idiotic myths of American journalism—that we aren’t allowed to have a viewpoint because we have to be objective. Give me a break: you can’t be a political reporter and not have political ideas, political beliefs. It’s asinine. You just have to be honest and open about them, so the audience knows where you’re coming from. And then from there you try your best to make sense of what the hell is going on.
Nobody’s objective. As human beings, we’re incapable of it. I’ve had journalists come and tell me, “Ken, I can’t vote, it would compromise my editorial independence.” So you have a candidate you do support, but not by exercising your constitutional right to vote for them? And you think this protects something important? If you’ve been a political reporter for two years, five years, ten or even twenty years, and you haven’t come to any conclusions after all that time spent observing politics—well, that’s very sad.
Janet Malcolm is one of my favorite writers of all time. She said two things about this that I think are extraordinarily important for journalists to know. One is, “We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up.” And the second, which is a variation on that theme, is:
For me, if you don’t know that in your bones, and adjust yourself accordingly as a writer and an observer of the human species, then you’re not a reporter. In fact you’re incapable of doing reporting of any serious nature. Being ignorant of your own biases, or lying to yourself about them, is very dangerous.
JMC: It’s almost like knowing what bias you’re inevitably coming from might help you identify the moments when the truth contradicts that bias.
KS: Yes. What year was it that Dukakis got creamed by Bush the Elder—1988? I was living in New York at the time, and I remember telling people, “Look, I know what the polls are saying, but I really think Dukakis is gonna win, because nobody I talk to says they’re gonna vote for Bush.” You’ve got to be capable of realizing when you’re talking to your own bubble and get out of that.
I know now my views aren’t popular in this country. If somebody with my views ran for office, they’d get dusted. You have to be aware of these things, I think, and adjust your evaluation of other people accordingly. I try to. But most Washington reporters don’t.
JMC: One of the remarkable things about your work is its wide historical perspective, even when you’re writing about the present. You have a really admirable grasp of the long-term evolution of journalism in this country. Can you take us through some of the highlights of that history, and what it means for the situation we confront today?
KS: Well, in the early years of the American republic, when political parties directly financed newspapers, you had captured media outlets that were little more than tools of political parties. Each party had its paper and they all toed their respective party line.
Eventually, by the start of the 1900s or so, you had an evolution to a different financial model based on making the newspaper more of an independent business funded by advertisers—that’s the origins of the penny press—think of William Randolph Hearst. It became profit-driven; they tried, primarily, to make money rather than promote a viewpoint.
They also lowered the price, which made it accessible to more people. For the first time newspapers started catering to the working class. Not always in a good way, of course. There was the tabloid stuff, the sensational reporting. It’s not a great model to be dependent on advertisers, to be honest. Because that’s corrupting too, in its own way.
They’d take pains never to piss off the advertisers. And they often became more interested in newsstand sales than quality—hence all the bad reporting on dumb subjects, instead of consistently focusing on the most serious issues. Plus, newspapers maintained some of their old bias. Especially the fancier, more expensive broadsheets that eventually evolved out of ad and subscription models. Everyone knew the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post each had a slight slant. But it was clubby. They were vehicles for elites to talk to each other.
That’s the way it remained for a long time. What I see as the high point of journalism, which was also the high point of American democracy in general, was the 1960s and Seventies. You had the hippies and the left-wing movements in broader society, and in journalism that manifested itself as the turn to hard-hitting investigations. It was the era of Woodward and Bernstein—well, more Bernstein really, Woodward is overrated in my opinion. He’s horrible now, he’s just like a stenographer. But anyway, the crusading, heroic investigative reporter became very popular with Watergate. And that, I think, is what produced the counterrevolution that sent everything down the tubes.
JMC: The neoliberal turn, you mean?
KS: Things turn to shit around 1974, in my opinion. I’m sure you’ve heard of the famous memo by Lewis Powell, who later went on to become a Supreme Court justice. It’s very telling. He’s writing to his friend at the Chamber of Commerce and saying, Look, we’ve gotta do something, business is getting thrashed, the hippies are taking over. That was the definitive moment. American intervention in the Vietnam War had come to an end, Nixon had been driven from office by public protest, and there was a palpable fear among the ruling class. Because there is a ruling class, it’s not some crazy left-wing term—the ruling class knew itself to be just that, and in that moment it was petrified, so it came together just as ruling classes always do in the end. They united to protect their interests, because after all they benefit the most from the current arrangement—that’s the main constant in the history of American capitalism.
You know, there are conspiracies, John. One can be overly conspiratorial and believe, like some MAGA people do, that the deep state is controlling the weather—all sorts of lunacy. But conspiracies happen all the time around the world. They happen because small groups of people do come together to protect their interests. And it happened in the United States in the early 1970s.
It would’ve been funny, honestly, that they were so scared of a socialist revolution, except that it prompted them to do something that ended very badly for the rest of us. They came together and they said, We have to check the power of the left in the university and in the media, we need to squeeze the workers. And so any dreams of reindustrialization gave way to neoliberalism. The modern lobbying industry was born in this era, the Heritage Foundation and all the big think tanks were born in this era, all the privatization and deregulation properly got underway in this era. It was a conscious conspiracy, if you will, to roll back the democratic gains of the 1930s and 1960s.
Including in the media. Katharine Graham—publisher and chairwoman of the Washington Post, where the Watergate story had broken—gave a famous speech in 1974 just a few months after Nixon resigned, about how we, the investigative journalists, “have gone too far.” You know, for investigating powerful people and corruption. There can be no more of that. So there was a lot less of that, for the most part. That was the dark moment when we lost.
JMC: How does “follow the money” apply to journalists themselves?
KS: One way is to buy think tanks, which they do all the time. The same people who are buying politicians are buying the think tanks, as well as, you know, creating various kinds of nonprofit groups that might appear independent, but are in fact created to promote a particular point of view.
Then there’s the art of planting stories. The best book I’ll never write (probably) is on corporate intelligence. Some oligarch will pay these corporate intelligence companies in Washington vast sums of money, and what they’ll do is send out a report to the media. And look, reporters are overworked, okay? A lot of them would like to do a better job, but they can’t, they don’t have the damn time, and they just need to feed the beast. No time for investigative stories, that’s for sure. So what the journalists will do is that they’ll hire these firms, and in return the firms will send them these memos, these reports.
Even if you go yourself to interview the people mentioned as sources in the memo, they’ll often tell you the same thing they told the corporate intelligence firm, because that firm was hired to produce a narrative that serves the interest of some oligarch.
JMC: Despite all this venality and corruption in the media environment of the early 21st century, you did nevertheless find a niche for yourself. And you broke some pretty amazing stories—there was that international arms dealing story in Harper’s, and you were at the forefront of investigations into the Clinton Foundation’s various corrupt dealings. What kind of opportunities existed in those days for people who wanted to keep up the proud tradition of investigative journalism?
KS: I was hired at the Los Angeles Times’s Washington, D.C. investigative unit in 2002 and worked there for four years. It was alright for a while.
Back then I would raise the money from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, or some other nonprofit or foundation, for stories I wanted to do that were investigative and might not have a broad enough appeal for a magazine to commission and pay for them; but if I got the funding, then I could always find an outlet to publish it, because they were good stories. It’s never easy to find $15,000 for an investigative piece. I also was on staff at Harper’s for eight or nine years. And those were good years—I could do pretty much anything I wanted. I traveled all over the world, and if I had a good story, I’d eventually find somebody to finance it.
But that was an exception. And it ended, eventually, because the industry collapsed. It’s the familiar story: Craigslist, free news, the failure to anticipate the internet was going to destroy the basis of the ad revenue and paid subscriber models. There are fewer jobs, and the industry keeps shrinking. The number of jobs that all a sudden just disappeared was extraordinary across the industry. You had a classic reserve army of labor, the Marxian concept—you know, all of us got thrown out. I jokingly like to say we journalists are the chimney sweeps of the 21st century. Our job came to be considered redundant, so we were made redundant as well.
JMC: So if some young writer wanted to follow your same path today, could they?
KS: No—and I can’t follow it either! The change happened quick, and a lot of the old opportunities were gone. Suddenly I couldn’t make any money. By 2016 I realized I was never going to be able to support myself as an independent journalist, as a freelancer. And then suddenly I was trapped. All I’d done in the past—being outspoken, not being a suck-up to the powerful or to one side or another—would make it impossible for me to ever get a job again, which is what happened.
JMC: But alongside this material shift you’re describing, journalism underwent something of a cultural shift as well, particularly around 2016, which seems like a key fulcrum point, marking the end of one journalistic era and the beginning of another.
KS: Yeah—it wasn’t just conditions in the industry. It was Trump. After he got elected in 2016 people talked about Trump Derangement Syndrome—how liberals lost their mind—and there’s absolutely some truth to that. But ultimately the cultural shift had more to do with the return of extreme partisanship. It was a return to those early days of the republic I mentioned, when newspapers were controlled by political factions. It’s not that the commercial or financial aspect disappeared entirely. Some places still worry about pissing off advertisers, or subscribers.
But then there’s the political issues. I know immediately if I see a story now, just from the venue or the author, what it’s going to say, who’s the target, who benefits from it: you’ve got crap like Newsmax and Fox, and you’ve got garbage like Occupy Democrats and MSNBC—and all their equivalents in print. We’ve returned to a system where liberal outlets are reluctant to write anything critical of the Democratic Party, and right-wing places absolutely will never criticize Trump. The general public, the political establishment, the media—across the board, the country has become much more polarized.
I don’t want to blame the public entirely. But the public has a role, because people do want their views reinforced. It’s scary and disturbing to me. My view is that living in a bubble is boring. It makes your life boring and dull. And I like to talk to people with opposing viewpoints. I don’t have to agree all the time, but I learn stuff. That view is less and less common nowadays.
JMC: One media take of yours that might come as a surprise to some readers, given your openly left-wing politics and your investigative bent, is your critique of the Intercept. Some years ago in Politico you called it “where journalism goes to die”—or at least, that’s the headline they gave you. You’ve been very critical of some Intercept journalists since then, too, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although you’ve also talked about your sympathies with and affection for other reporters who are still there. For you, what’s the problem with that milieu?
KS: To be clear, there’s a lot of brilliant people at the Intercept whom I greatly respect. In fact, there are parts of that article that I regret. But there are some critiques that I still stand by. Especially regarding the billionaire funder, Pierre Omidyar. The least objectionable reason oligarchs buy news outlets is to stroke their ego. My attitude is that the owners of a news outfit should stay the hell out of the newsroom. But Omidyar was all over the newsroom. He clearly wanted an outlet that would to an extent reflect his political viewpoint.
When I came into that place I thought Greenwald was great. Once I got to seeing how the sausage was made, it was not real inspiring. I remember seeing one story Greenwald wrote about Saudi Arabia, I think it was. The whole thing was based on real reporting by BuzzFeed and Politico, sprinkled with Glenn’s commentary, as if he himself had done a story. And that’s what Glenn does: he doesn’t really report or investigate. He’s a pundit.
There’s something you have to understand about him, to help you evaluate his journalism and to see why he took the turn he did. And that is that he started out as a defense attorney. That’s huge—because it’s an awful preparation for being a journalist, to be a defense attorney or a prosecutor. You’ve got a client, and all you care about is defending them no matter what. So he’s tremendously good at building a case that seems to be very shrewdly constructed. You come away from his stories thinking he’s really nailed it. And then you realize: wait a second, I haven’t heard from the prosecutor, not one quote from the other side. Because if he were a real journalist, sure he’d have a view and an angle, but he’d quote from and represent all sides, even if he himself sides with one over the other. You never see that in Glenn because he stacks the deck.
JMC: And if the client, so to speak, changes, then reality distorts in order to fit that new worldview.
KS: Exactly. He did some good work at first. But Glenn picks and chooses. I believe he slants his stories, which are always designed to go after someone he doesn’t like to the exclusion of everything else. And he won’t do that to his friends. That, to me, crosses a line.
JMC: And what about Taibbi? What’s his deal?
KS: Taibbi is different, and way more complicated. I think a big part of what drove him at first was just a basic level of immaturity in his reaction to the way he’d been criticized by his former allies on the left. He’d been criticized before the Twitter Files, for various reasons. And instead of examining the possibility that they might have had a point, doing a little reflection, he doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down.
JMC: Do you have any advice for journalists who want to avoid the sort of pitfalls you’ve talked about in this conversation—being an establishment stenographer like Woodward, or an ex-counterculture sellout like Taibbi and Greenwald?
KS: I mean, look, we’re all flawed, and probably deeply flawed—I’d very much include myself here. We’re imperfect people. That means if you’re going to be in journalism, you have to at least try to maintain some journalistic standards. And by that I absolutely don’t mean being “fair and balanced,” because there’s really no such thing. It’s being honest.
That means that if your reporting ends up not confirming what you initially set out to report—probably because of whatever political sympathies or alignments you have—you go through with it anyway. I know, it’s awkward to tell an editor, “I pitched you a story, it’s wrong.” But it doesn’t matter. You need to make sure your reporting always sustains the work you produce. It’s easier to do what Greenwald does and build a case. That’s way easier to do than journalism. I’ve been misled by sources and slow to figure it out. I’ve looked back at things I published and realized I was wrong after the fact. But I can honestly say that I try. I’m aware of my biases, and I try to fix my mistakes, even when it’s inconvenient.
Periodically somebody will bring me a story, bring me documents, and the overwhelming temptation is to think it’s a slam dunk. But once you start looking into things, life is more complicated. That’s not to say there’s no such thing as right or wrong, or that every truth lies in the middle. But usually there’s some evidence you have to evaluate that doesn’t support your point, if you’re doing it honestly. And who wants to do that? Way easier to just throw it out, pretend you didn’t see it. That’s how you end up writing a story where all the facts are true, but the story is a lie. That doesn’t mean I’ve ever set out to write a story about someone corrupt only to find they’re a saint. But it’s always good to talk to people from all perspectives, not only as a journalist, but as a human being.
Be independent. Go after the bastards, if you get a good scoop and you can prove it. But don’t hesitate to go after your own side, too, if they deserve it. In the context of U.S. politics, Bernie Sanders is pretty great. I don’t worship him, though I do think he’s probably a force for good. But if somebody brought me a killer story on him, something shocking or dark that I could actually prove, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s how you win readers’ trust that you’re trying your best to tell the truth. Over the years I’ve developed a reputation as a lefty reporter who sometimes goes after my own side. And yeah, you’ve gotta do it. Otherwise you’re just a hack.
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