



Was there an advantage then, being your own boss, as it were, at The Exiled? You were able to just follow this thread that no one wanted to look into.

Actually, the story was first published by Playboy. It was Playboy's blog, basically. At the time they were trying to become more political and relevant, so that's where it was published. And that's one of the problems we ran into. The story went out Friday, and over the weekend a smear campaign formed against us, and on Monday the story was pulled with no explanation. It was taken down because of a coordinated smear campaign by politicians and journalists with some of the biggest publications in the U.S. They basically called us conspiracy theorists, they called us crazy, that we didn't know what we were talking about, as if we believed in aliens and UFOs and stuff like that.

It's pretty funny, looking back on it now. Everybody knows that the Koch brothers really are powerful — extremely powerful, even more powerful than most people imagine them to be. You just have to look at what happened in Wisconsin the other day.

So, you guys did the story, Playboy ran it on its blog, then immediately pulled it. What happened from there?

We had the story on The Exiled, but probably for the first year we weren't really credited. Most people who would report it, and eventually say the same things that we originally said, did not credit us. I think probably that's because the story was "discredited," that it was pulled by Playboy. People knew that we did it, but we were never really credited publicly for breaking the story. It was probably a year later, when we started to get recognition. For a while there, we were basically plagiarized. Our recognition was denied us. It was pretty brutal, you know? It was a harsh lesson, the reality of journalism back here in the USA.

One of the things I’ve always loved about The Exiled is that you look at the stories behind the news, and you call out journalists that are playing games. I guess this leads us to SHAME (Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics).

The SHAME media accountability project is the way that we want to deal with "journalistic malpractice." Ever since The Exiled crew started running a news organization here in America, we've been subject to all sorts of vicious smears because of our reporting. SHAME is an idea that formed over time, because readers have been asking for something like this.

"It was a harsh lesson, the reality of journalism back here in the USA."

It specifically deals with the new media technology, and how to deal with the internet; which, on the one hand it democratizes the sharing of information, but it also virtualizes it, and so you're never sure who the hell you're talking to. You're never meeting people face-to-face, there's really no one standing behind anything, you don't know who owns the domain name. It can be pretty obscure. So, how do you deal with the information landscape? How do you know who to trust, how do you know what things they did before? Things are not so easy to figure out. The information is out there, so much of it that it's hard — even for experts — to get through the noise, and figure out what the fuck is going on.

Why did you pick Malcolm Gladwell for the inaugural profile?

I started looking into his "big tobacco" connections probably a year ago, and as I learned more about him I decided that he might just be the most successful corporate propagandist, or the most successful third party advocate that is alive today. When you think about it, he is the premiere essayist for The New Yorker, one of the most successful publications in America. Gladwell is part of their brand, and he quite openly takes money from pharmaceutical companies, writes about pharmaceutical companies, defends pharmaceutical companies in the pages of The New Yorker, and doesn't disclose that he actually gets paid money by the pharmaceutical industry when he writes about it. And that's just one example.

How’s the reaction been so far?

It's been like this "slow motion explosion." You can see it move through Twitter, Reddit, various forums. The report was just reprinted byAlterNet, it's been reprinted by Naked Capitalism. It's making its way through the internet.

Everyone knows there's something wrong with Malcolm Gladwell, the way he structures his arguments, the way he always seems to reinforce the status quo, the way he always lets toxic corporate interests off the hook in some sneaky, clever way. So people seem relieved that their instincts are [proven] correct, and a lot of readers have expressed that: "there was always something there, and now I understand exactly what that is."