Discussing disinformation and media with Matt Sheffield

In this episode, right-wing media critic Matt Sheffield and I discuss the disinformation crisis and the climate change crisis, and how they are deeply intertwined.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

Matt Sheffield started his first conservative media website, bashing news anchor Dan Rather for liberal bias, way back in 2000, and in subsequent years became a key figure in right-wing media criticism.

But the rise of Trump left him disillusioned and he has since become a prominent critic of right-wing media. He now runs a site called Flux dedicated to accurate, inclusive journalism.

Last week, Matt and I got together on one of these live Twitter Spaces things — a glorified conference call, basically, to which people can tune in and ask questions — and had a wide-ranging conversation about the disinformation crisis, how it manifested in climate change, and what can be done about it.

The audio was archived, available exclusively to Flux and Volts subscribers. I hope you enjoy it.

Matt Sheffield

We're doing a space tonight to discuss climate change and the birth of the disinformation economy. And David has been a longtime climate change correspondent and environmental columnist for a while, and he's also the proprietor and publisher, writer, et cetera, of Volts, a newsletter, which he started one year ago today, which he was just recounting that for our previous space, which I accidentally ended somehow. So your experience overall has been pretty good, you were saying? And I think I ended the space inadvertently right after you said you work better alone.

David Roberts

Yes —

Matt Sheffield

I inadvertently proved your point, I think.

David Roberts

Yes. This is why I don't talk to people. Yeah, it's been going great. I have found that readers are excited to go deeper and wonkier and share my obsessions. I'm sure different writers have different opinions about this, but I much prefer it over writing for a general interest publication.

Matt Sheffield

And you wrote a retrospective on your site today that — one of the things you said is that you appreciated not having to reintroduce topics over and over again in terms of — you assume that your current readers actually know who you are and something about the material, I guess.

David Roberts

Right, yes. It's the famed return to blogging. It is a persistent audience who will follow me over time and thus who I don't have to explain that climate change is bad in every post anymore.

Matt Sheffield

Yeah. And I guess it's a way of trying to have a continued conversation rather than one that starts over de novo every time. Right?

David Roberts

Yes. And it's explicitly I mean, I did it knowing that I would be writing for a much smaller audience. It's not a mass audience play. It's very much for a self-selecting group of people who are more than average interested in my subject matter. So I think it can still have influence because I think the people who do read it are sprinkled throughout the world, the energy world, in high places. But I've basically transitioned away from mass writing, I guess is what I'd say.

Matt Sheffield

So now, before you were doing just for those again who hadn't seen what you were doing before you were working at Vox and then before that you were working at Grist, which is a website that's still out there doing climate coverage. How is it different now compared to your Grist days would you say?

David Roberts

Oh goodness. Well for one thing I didn't know what the hell I was doing back in my Grist days. I was hired at Grist as an editorial assistant in I think like 2004 with no background in journalism and no real background in environmentalism which is what Grist was supposedly about and knowing nothing at all about climate change or anything really. So the ten years I spent at Grist were in retrospect it's something I think journalists don't really get anymore these days, which was it was a place where I could labor in obscurity while I learned what the hell I was doing.

Matt Sheffield

Yeah. And I think that's an interesting observation you make there because that is one of the things that's definitely very different about media now is that you and I are both Gen Xers in our forties and in the old days, the media industry was very sort of anti young people in terms of letting them have public facing work to a large degree. And so basically they had people work as research assistants or as publicists or something like that —

David Roberts

Or come up through local papers. I'm old enough to remember when the way you came up through the reporting game is through local papers. And it's interesting if you go through that route you're taught a certain set of skills and rules and norms but I wasn't taught those at all. I had never had any experience in that world at all. So all I was reacting to and sort of shaping myself around was what do readers like? What is helpful to readers? And if you just follow that string you don't end up in the model of the inverted pyramid, daily objective third voice — information is relevant.

You know what I mean? There's no spine to your research. You don't know what you're looking for. And this is the sort of feeling I get from reading lots of objective news stories. It's like a grab bag of facts. It's like a grab bag of true things. They're all true. But how do they hang together? What do they all mean? That's what's missing. And once you approach it that way, what is sort of my narrative here? What kinds of things am I researching? What kinds of arguments am I trying to make that helps you know where to dig and doing that over time informs you more fully I think, than you get informed doing objective style reporting.

Matt Sheffield

Traditional training with journalism has also it made it to the point of the topic today about climate change and disinformation. It made them very basically totally unprepared to understand how a gaslighting campaign was being built right in front of their eyes. They couldn't even see it happening. And you could argue that this was something that probably was first done by the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 60s when they did research that figured out that smoking causes cancer and how do we keep the public from knowing that? But basically that information, understanding how that happened and why it happened, it never really filtered down into elite journalism, I would say.

And climate change was kind of the next area where this —

David Roberts

It happens again and again and it happens — these critiques of the flaws of this style of journalism are things people have been saying for decades now. When I first started in this whole game in the early 2000s, it was sort of the rise of the net roots and the sort of famous like, oh, the bastions of the mainstream media are being stormed by these outsiders, all this blah blah, all this sort of utopian talk. Bu