Matt Taibbi argues that the New York Times' portrayal of his work and sources, particularly Mike Benz, is misleading and attempts to discredit his investigation into federal censorship by associating it with discredited conspiracy theories. He maintains that his reporting was largely complete before significant interaction with Benz, suggesting the Times' article misrepresents the timeline and influence on the work.

Taibbi credibly exposes some fallacies on the part of the Times writers, but sprinkles ad hominem attacks (including an appeal to motive), throughout the essay.

In the most cogent part of his article, Taibbi calls out the Times piece for cherry picking information and misrepresenting the timeline of his work on the Twitter Files:

Though I didn't find "direct evidence" of government involvement in censorship programs in the first Twitter Files piece, we did discover it, on a grand scale, almost immediately after. Subsequent Twitter Files reports reflected this, including "Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary" from December 16th, 2022, and the "Twitter and Other Government Agencies" story published on Christmas Eve of 2022...

Extracting only one of several conclusions from the Twitter Files enables the Times writers to give their reader the false impression of the journalists' findings.

Taibbi goes on to call out the Times writers' straw man portrayal of himself and Shellenberger:

Our central thesis about state-sponsored censorship was online months before we met Benz.  By mid-December 2022, I knew we were looking at a sweeping federal content-control program, and repeated the idea many times.

Nonetheless, the gist of today's Times piece is that Shellenberger and I got this thesis from Benz.

This is similar to what Fallacycheck.com found in its assessment of the Times piece. The majority of Taibbi's and Shellenberger work on the Twitter files had already been published before their first meeting with Benz, and therefore could not have been influenced by him, whereas the narrative in the Times article is constructed to deliver exactly the opposite impression.

Taibbi makes some jabs that detract from the core validity of his argument.

1. ad hominem • When referring to Rutenberg and Lee Meyers, Taibbi often inserts deprecatory jabs, calling their article "a desperate slam job," "a craven and dishonest piece," and a "piece of deep state fan fiction" that constitutes "hysterics." These are aspersions of character that draw the reader's attention to the Times writers themselves, rather than sticking to the debunking of their actual points.

2. appeal to motive • Taibbi suggests that a motive can be inferred from the timing of the Times article:

...published just before oral arguments in a historic First Amendment case in the Supreme Court... ​Let's hope the Supreme Court doesn't get distracted by these hysterics. Is there any doubt that's what this story is designed to accomplish?

Because Taibbi both starts and ends his essay with this point, he is leveraging the presumed motive to encourage his reader to dismiss the Times article as a politically motivated "hit piece." The problem with this is that even if the article's timing was intended to influence the Supreme Court case, that motivation does not have any bearing on whether the points made in the article are valid or not -- they must be assessed on their own merits.

And since Taibbi has very good rejoinders to those points, he would have been better off just calling out the fallacies in Rutenberg's and Lee Myers' attempt to link his work to Benz.