A clash between leftist MSNBC host (redundant, I know) Mehdi Hasan and “ Twitter Files ” scribe Matt Taibbi went viral last week for all the wrong reasons. The roughly three-minute clip was framed by many as an old-fashioned media smackdown, with Taibbi on the receiving end. It’s easy to see why: In this media landscape, shallow impressions move the needle more than a sincere involvement with ideas.

The contrast between Hasan and Taibbi was stark. The ultraslick Hasan, broadcasting from the confines of a glossy corporate studio, donned a finely tailored suit and spoke with the kind of rolling and booming confidence of a wartime newscaster on the BBC. Taibbi, on the other hand, beamed in from his home office wearing clunky headphones and a flannel from the glory days of grunge-rock; he stammered and sputtered, as he often does, and appeared embarrassed by the projection of his own voice. Hasan was eminently prepared for the subject of the interview, which was Elon Musk ’s role in aiding the Indian government in speech suppression, while Taibbi was thoroughly unprepared, even though he had been the one to call the debate in the first place.

Now, it takes a tough person to buck the leftist media in public — and especially on their turf. Such a figure is bound to take his lumps. And Taibbi took his. He screwed up and I’m sure he knows it.

But the far more damning aspect of the interview was reflected in Hasan’s Herculean effort to take down the quintessential Generation X journo over his role in revealing Big Tech’s cooperation with U.S. government agencies to suppress political speech. Rather than focus on the problems of government censorship in the United States, which seem not to trouble Hasan at all despite his deep concerns with similar problems in India, or, indeed, even acknowledge the existence of such problems, Hasan identified and clung to a few misshapen trees in the Twitter Files forest. More than anything, I felt sorry for his audience, who doubtless left the interview with the impression that speech suppression efforts had been “debunked." The most thoroughly enbubbled legacy media consumers are the most vulnerable to having their civil liberties stripped away by the social leeches Hasan protects for a living.

Of course, it’s important for journalists to come under scrutiny, and to Taibbi’s credit, he has acknowledged and amended his mistakes. But Hasan deserves equal scrutiny in this case. He should be made to ask why his outrage over government censorship is so selective and why his efforts to expose wrongdoing don’t extend to, say, Apple’s Tim Cook over his company’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. Surely, Apple’s involvement in censoring information at odds with the CCP agenda is a more consequential matter than a few sloppily reported details in the Twitter Files. Yet, it is unimaginable that Hasan would lift a finger to expose the truth in this instance, let alone grill Cook with the focus and determination with which he grilled Taibbi.

It practically goes without saying at this point that Hasan’s employer and the decaying legacy news media that MSNBC represents has been spectacularly and unrepentantly wrong on most of the major stories of the 21st century. And what’s more, they’ve been sneeringly wrong. They’ve exacerbated America’s political and cultural divide in exchange for clicks and views (and man have the elite media personalities benefitted from our discord! ). Meanwhile, on their watch, trust in the news media has plummeted to historic lows .

Democratic Party operatives such as Hasan would attribute this to the rise of “disinformation,” but this is simply elite-speak for “whatever threatens our authority.” The real reason for the drop is that people stopped believing journalists are looking out for the public’s interests.

Nothing in the viral clip alters that perception. But at least Hasan will sell a few more copies of his book.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.