02/22/11 – Matt Barganier – The Scott Horton Show

Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
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All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Now, I don't know if you guys got your Al Jazeera English live stream going or not, but I've been watching the most hilarious falling dictator rant of my lifetime, at least, all morning here on Al Jazeera English.
Moammar Gaddafi, boy, he's going off now.
If you violate the constitution, there is a death penalty for that.
Man, this guy, earlier he just broke off into, what is the matter with you people?
And in fact, even invoked Bill Clinton's Waco massacre as justification for the blood being spilled on the streets of Tripoli this morning.
But anyway, we have a show full of guests and we're going to go ahead and go to our first guest right now.
It's Matt Barganier, the editor of Antiwar.com.
And I would say, without a doubt, the most talented, hilarious, and interesting writer we've ever featured at Antiwar.com.
You can find his archives at original.antiwar.com/Matt and about 10 million blog entries back in the day anyway.
Welcome to the show, Matt.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
You're too kind.
No, no, you deserve it.
I used to, literally at midnight, you know, central time, I would hit refresh and, oh, look, a new Barganier.
Collateral damage, me and my friend Chad.
Hey, hey, hey, did you see the new Barganier came out last night?
Hell, yeah.
That was great.
They probably put you in a very select, and by that I mean small group.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.
You know what?
I bet I'm going to get a lot of emails and I bet we're going to see a lot of comments.
And yeah, come back.
Anyway, so it's fundraising time at Antiwar.com.
And somebody, I think Angela, had the bright idea.
Let's bring on all of the Antiwar.com staff this week, talk a little bit about the site and what our jobs are at Antiwar.com.
And you're our editor, so I figured I'd give you a chance to talk a little bit about your job and maybe tell people what it takes to get their articles published at Antiwar.com, that kind of thing.
And then maybe we can talk about the world turned upside down in the second segment here.
Okay.
So what is it that you do for Antiwar.com exactly, Matt?
Well, what I do, I do half the week and Jeremy does the other half of the week.
So there's some, you know, which is good.
There's some balance there since what we're doing is selecting the opinion pieces for the page.
That's a big part of it.
And working with unsolicited submissions as well as the regular columns.
So it's not like one person, you know, controls the entire flow of opinion onto the page.
But what I do on my days is sometime early in the morning, no later than nine central, I start checking the headlines on the site, you know, see if anything happened overnight.
Start looking at general news elsewhere, my RSS feed, stuff like that.
And after I'm, you know, caught up on anything that may have happened since the previous night, I start reading opinion links that people have submitted.
I start scouring online for opinion pieces.
You can go to our sources page to get an idea of a partial list of what I work with.
I try to go down through all of those throughout the week and find good opinion pieces.
But also, you know, there's opposition research, you know.
I read what's in the Washington Post, whether it's good or not, for instance, and things from neocon sites just to keep up with what everybody's saying.
And, you know, I work with the columnists on revising their weekly entries and with people who just submit things every month and a while, copy edit and fact check the original pieces.
And so that's pretty much what I do during the day.
And then around 10 p.m., start proofreading and checking the next day's page for its upload, ideally at 11 p.m.
Central.
So it's kind of a long day.
Well, you know, little do you know, but in a way, you're kind of an associate producer of this show.
You and Jeremy actually do a lot to help me pick out who I want to talk to on this show and about what.
And, you know, antiwar.com, I don't just post radio interviews there or whatever.
It's my number one source for what the hell's going on in the world all day.
Yeah, yeah.
I noticed that frequently people who've been in the viewpoint section are on your show a couple of days later or the next day, which is great.
I mean, it's nice to actually be able to pick the brains of the people and get more in-depth than the articles.
Well, you know, I mean, I've always considered radio is basically about recommending things to read that people might not have heard of, authors they might not have heard of, the most important stories that they may have missed, because you can only learn so much listening to the radio, but you can certainly learn footnotes and where to go and where the good research is and that kind of thing.
So I tend to think that, you know, I mean, first of all, whether it's news or viewpoints, the staff at antiwar.com are, you know, you and everybody else are absolutely on the ball picking out what's the most important thing of the day.
And then, of course, those are the things that I want to explore more in-depth and talk about with the people who write those articles.
So it makes for a really great symbiotic type relationship thing going on there.
I want to ask you about the editorial policy because, you know, it seems to me that both you and Jeremy are very strict about quality and yet very open to new writers, a wide variety of different points of view where people are coming from, but you never settle.
It's always, you know, grade A stuff.
I hope so.
In terms of there being some sort of policy, it's really, we're a pretty decentralized organization.
So, you know, I have my own criteria and Jeremy has his own criteria and everybody else, you know, choose things according to their own, you know, preferences and principles and whatnot.
But yeah, we try to make it interesting and try to make, you know, to me, it has to be non-interventionist.
And that doesn't mean necessarily that the person writing it has to be non-interventionist across the board.
In fact, they're frequently not, you know, often with like foreign policy realists, they're not strictly non-interventionist.
But the particular article, the particular topic that they're talking about, they have to be non-interventionist.
Everything else is pretty much negotiable.
You know, we run things for people who I don't agree with on anything else other than their views on that particular issue.
Right.
Well, I mean, I think that's such a strength for antiwar.com.
You know, the fact that we're all plumb line libertarians really means that the point of view we're coming from is the one best equipped for identifying what's the best being put out by everybody else.
And being able to say, here's a guy who's wrong about everything, but boy, does he nail it on our relationship with Germany or whatever.
Right.
I mean, you know, ideally you can, we can pick pieces and, you know, I'm always on the lookout for pieces that incorporate some other libertarian themes or some sort of more general of libertarian viewpoint, or at least, you know, strict non-interventionism, you know, where they don't just say, well, we shouldn't intervene in this particular case, but they make a broader case for non-intervention.
But, you know, that's not going to be every piece.
You know, there's sometimes people like, you know, Nicholas Kristof, who generally is not that great, has written a few good things in recent weeks about what's happening in the Middle East.
And so, you know, they'll get in there.
I, you know, we even run occasionally things by people who I could absolutely, generally detest, like Christopher Hitchens, and every, you know, stop clock can be right.
Right.
We'll leave it right there for the moment.
It's Matt Barganier.
He's the editor at antiwar.com.
And when we come back, we'll talk about a little bit more about the site and then what's going on in the Middle East, hopefully, as well.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Stay tuned.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And if I were you, I would type into the search thing site colon antiwar.com space Matt and spend the rest of the afternoon reading Matt Barganier.
It's been a while since he's been writing for us, but man, it's great stuff.
My favorite was, dude, you just got like totally plamed a glossary for our times.
And I think playing was a pink slip of the tongue.
And then but democratically was and I made a bumper sticker out of this one, how civilized people loot, oppress and murder one another, as opposed to the informal methods of barbarians.
And then with Democrats, those whose fevers of moral rectitude and fiscal restraint vary in inverse proportion to their proximity from power.
Anyway, it was awesome.
But yeah, Matt Barganier, he's our editor at antiwar.com and a great writer as well.
And now, Matt, so what if someone was trying to write an article for antiwar.com and they kept getting told no, what do they do to make sure that it's good enough?
Well, you know, sometimes it's just not a good fit.
I mean, you know, I try to explain this to people sometimes.
And the great thing is, you know, this is not like the old days where there are only so many venues where you could hope to get published.
You know, I frequently tell people, you know, it's not it's not you, it's us, really, or it's not you, it's me, it's you're writing, it's fine and everything.
It's just that you clearly want to work in some other things that are that are either off topic, or, you know, you're not really non interventionist.
You know, there are other sites where you can be published.
No, you're just a gatekeeper.
There's a big gate and you're keeping it.
I've been told that but you know, and you know, there's some truth to that.
It's just that there are so many gates now, you know, you can, you can get through one of them if you if you keep trying, you know, or at least the hop is just go to blogspot.com and make your own.
Right, right.
Exactly.
So yeah, I mean, you know, I guess we could run every single thing that people send, but that would, what would be the point anymore?
You know, we're, we're trying to pass things along that we think are the best analysis or, you know, the most interesting, whatever.
I mean, and yes, it does have to fit in with our general viewpoint of being non interventionist.
So, so that's one thing I think is otherwise, you know, non interventionist, and there's no problem on that front.
The best thing to do is just to, you know, self edit.
Don't send things that are full of errors, factual or grammatical or typographical, whatever.
You know, that sort of indicates the sloppiness of thought when we get things like that.
And you know, we're willing to help people with their submissions, but it's important that they show that they did their homework first.
Yeah, well, hyperlinks don't hurt when it comes to that too.
Providing proof for all your assertions.
Right.
Don't, you know, don't, I hate it when people quote others without providing a link to them because, you know, that, that to me signals, well, is that really what that person said?
Right.
Yeah.
And haste makes waste.
You know, if you're in so much a hurry, you can't prove it, then why should anybody be in a hurry to read what you wrote?
That's kind of it, man.
All right.
Well, so I'm curious as to if you were still writing articles these days, what would they say about what's going on in the Middle East right now?
It's pretty exciting time, isn't it?
It is exciting.
I'm not sure what they would say.
You know, I'm going to be sort of the odd person who says that I really don't know what's going on.
You know, part of my belief in non-interventionism is rooted in a sort of epistemological skepticism, I guess.
You know, a doubt that people can really know what's going on in the domestic politics of foreign countries, especially when we see that the highly paid pundits in this country do such a lousy job of analyzing domestic American politics.
And then suddenly, you know, something happens in a country that they've never covered before and they know everything about it.
So I don't really know exactly what's going on, right, as it's happening.
You know, I think that these sort of things take time to analyze and digest.
And I'm really loathe to make predictions about what's going to happen in faraway places.
That said, I do still have to use opinion pieces to do some of those things.
But I'm open to different points of view.
You know, I may run something that seems like a compelling argument about what's happening in Egypt one day and then run something the next day that sort of contradicts that or that, you know, looks at it in a different light, at least.
Well, you know, my thing is, too, I completely agree with you about, you know, how opaque most of this is.
But it seems to me like, for example, the footage from Tahir Square, I don't know if you got a chance to hear that interview, Joe Lauria, where he's standing half a block off of Tahir Square last Friday holding a cell phone out.
And you can hear the madness, just the chaos of celebration and people shooting off fireworks and cheering freedom like a scene out of a Hollywood movie or something.
You know, 10 times what Hollywood could imagine for a scene like that.
And so I just I'm basically taking a general optimism and and hoping for the best there, because it really does seem like these people deserve it, you know?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, certainly I think that, you know, the main point is just that that I try to that I'm looking for and pieces on the subject is not so much, you know, predictions, either optimistic or pessimistic.
But just, you know, reminders that the US should not get involved in the countries where it's already involved.
It should, you know, stop being involved.
And, you know, I mentioned Nick Kristof just a minute ago.
And while he's done some some good reporting from from Egypt, you know, now he has this this thing up on his Twitter feed last night where he's calling for the US to intervene in Libya, and, you know, like start bombing Libyan airfields.
So, you know, they just can't help themselves.
They go, you know, even the foreign policy establishment, both in politics and in punditry.
Even when they're right about this or that, they ultimately just don't seem to be able to help themselves when it comes to calling for US intervention, which they are sure they know exactly what needs to be done.
They know exactly what will help the people there.
They know exactly what everyone there, you know, would appreciate the sort of help that they want.
And of course, I'm sure that that's exactly what most Libyans want is their country to start being bombed.
You know, it really is amazing.
I guess he just have to forget that, you know, America's been helping Libya militarily these last, you know, what, eight years now he's been back on the empire's tit, and, you know, the government there is now our responsibility.
We're supposed to be the ones over there bombing it in favor of their own people now?
Ridiculous.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time.
It's great to talk to you on the show again, Matt.
It's been a while.
Sure.
Thank you, Scott.
And thanks for all the work that you do.
Everybody, that's Matt Barganier.
He's the editor at Antiwar.com.
Check out his archives at original.antiwar.com/Matt.
And look up some old blog archives too.
Good stuff.