“Traditional journalism doesn’t exist anymore”

Rob Taub is a board member of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents (AFC-USA), as well as having a career spanning a wide array of mediums such as film, television, radio, and print. His career in journalism includes writing for The Huffington Post, People Magazine, and FoxNews.com. Rob is also a fierce advocate for diabetes health and awareness and is an ambassador for the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association.

We spoke with Rob over Instagram live to talk about his long career, joking around on Fox News, his views on pharmaceutical companies, and living in New York during the pandemic. Below is an edited transcription of our conversation.

As a board member of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents, how does your role fulfill you? Why is this organization so important? What is the message you want to share with foreign and American correspondents?

Journalism unfortunately is changing, there’s nothing we can do about that. When I worked for Time Incorporated, there were more than ten magazines around and you could go downstairs to the bar that was at the Time and Life building and you’d interact with a hundred journalists everyday. It was clubby, fun, and educational to meet people you’d been reading, for me people I’d been reading since I was in high school! They were my heroes and you got to know them walking down the halls. It was a different time and now while that no longer really exists we have organizations like ours to help perpetuate that and to do what we’re doing now on Instagram which I think is fantastic.  

In your latest blog post “Farewell Nostradamus, Hello Irving Berlin” you touch upon a resilient New York City, a place you’re happy to call home. What has living in the city through the pandemic taught you?

I’m happy to be 65 years old because I’ve experienced a lot and I’ve seen New York at its worst and at its best. It’s not going to always be like Camelot and be continually perfect and wonderful and that’s what makes me appreciate the good. I’ve experienced the difficult, trying, demanding times, which these have been now, and I’d like to say that I spent my time working on a book but I didn’t! It’s harder now to find opportunities to write, I finally found somebody who’s revamping my website, it’s in kind of a state of flux, but I am now dedicated to starting to generate more material and it’s probably the first time in my career where I don’t have a column for a regular news organization. It’s just harder and harder to do, traditional journalism as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m involved in real estate because very few people can make an entire living as a writer. But if there are jobs that give us the opportunity to be able to write then that’s great. It’s a business now that’s evolving and it’s harder and harder if you’re a young person to build a career here but I think that there are options and opportunities and we’re an organization that can help with that. 

As a broker in New York City, what can you predict about falling rent prices? Has the city been changed for good because of the pandemic or do you predict things to return to normal in the near future? 

I don’t know what the new normal is going to be and how long people are really going to tolerate working from home. I don’t happen to think it’s a great thing. It depends. It’s just a time where New York is changing, I don’t want to be predictive about it. In 1971 New York City was the place for culture, entertainment, media and in many cases it still is. We've just taken a break. Will there be adjustments there? Yes. In 1971 New York City was on its way to bankruptcy but we recovered. But it was still a place that had Broadway, the New York Knicks, the Mets, the Yankees, opera and Lincoln Center. You can go to Florida, the weather’s beautiful, there’s no state tax there but you’ll have as much trouble finding a museum as you will the Loch Ness Monster. These are interesting times. It’s incumbent upon us now, as citizens of New York City and America to propel ourselves forward and do the right thing and not just sit around and complain as New Yorkers are wont to do. But helping make things better and improve New York and celebrate everything that’s great about New York from bagels to Broadway, that’s something I can get into as a journalist. But The New York Times has become pretty sensationalistic. What kind of stories are they covering? I was chastised by a lot of journalists when I had a column at Newsmax because it’s such a conservative organization, but the two editors there, Nick Sanchez and Ken Chandler were both veteran news people. I wrote pretty much liberal articles but nothing was ever questioned and the same for Fox News. I enjoyed contributing there, participating, nobody tried to control or censor me. It’s easy to condemn them, in fact, I have a lot of friends who go “I can’t believe you’re on Fox News all the time!” and I’m like “Have you ever watched me? No! So how can you condemn me? And are you willing to pay me money if I’m not working at Fox News?” Who else is going to hire me? Probably not MSNBC.

You’ve done a lot of satirical work in the news, what was it like cracking jokes on Fox News? Do you see more of that in your future?

Everybody except maybe Sean Hannity had a pretty good sense of humor. Humor is a tool to use to ingratiate yourself and disarm people who may disagree with you. I used to be on with very conservative people and I always got my point across. I was allowed to have my say. Like the Washington Generals who always play against but  have never won against the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s kind of like professional wrestling. I wouldn’t say I actually really ‘won’ my points on Fox News but I was never censored or controlled in any way and I found it to be a positive experience, I worked with great editors there. They made my work better and I couldn’t say that for many other publications. I used to cringe a lot of times at Time Incorporated because I’d have like five edits I went through and sometimes I’d get an article back and the only thing I’d get back that was the same was my byline. They’d change every lead paragraph I had! Sometimes I just have surprising experiences as a writer. Again, it’s incumbent upon young writers. I had an argument once years ago with Ariana Huffington. She wasn’t going to let me cover Anthony Scaramucci and his SALT conference, this was before Donald Trump was president. And she said we’re killing this article. It was a great piece that I wrote. So I called the two or three top papers in Las Vegas and they gave me the full Sunday spread. Then I went on television in Vegas and promoted the article. I’d say it was one of the better pieces I ever wrote. I was well-paid and the editor enhanced the article tremendously. That’s the thing that I think is important in journalism. You want to play tennis with someone that is better than you are. My admonition to young writers now is don’t come out of college at age 23 and think that you are God. You can learn things from us old geezers and editors can improve your work. They’re not there to make it worse. They want the product to be good too.

Rob Taub

You wrote a piece back in 2018 for the outlet NewsMax entitled “Pharma is My Friend--Why Do So Many Politicians Bash It?”. In this piece you criticize government officials and politicians for the declining accessibility of life-saving medications used in the treatment of diabetes. I just want to know, with the news stories of the past few years regarding extraordinary prices of insulin due to the greed of companies, do you still feel the same way? Do you believe it is the responsibility of the government to keep prices down or of pharmaceutical companies? 

It’s tricky. Pharmaceutical companies have become more aware but I do believe in what I wrote in that politicians like to pick an industry to demonize. In the 70s the evil empire was the oil companies and we went after them. Now a good enemy are pharmaceutical companies. If the government was in charge of medications, we’d all be dead. Yes, insulin is expensive, Ozempic is wildly expensive, but I think that pharmaceutical companies are working to help us in that regard and politicians should be working in conjunction with them. Quite honestly I don’t know if I’d be alive right now if not for all the medications I take. There’s so much divisiveness in this country and I'm not saying big pharma companies are wonderful, caring, and loving but pharmaceutical companies are there to make a profit like any other business. There’s no way to give us free medication. Instead of politicians saying it should all be free, they should come up with a plan to make it free or better yet work in conjunction with these pharmaceutical companies. 

That article that I wrote actually got me a lot of attention. If you put something good on the internet it evokes a response. It wasn’t the demonization of anybody, I wasn’t taking an extreme side, I’m much more of a centrist. It’s harder to be a centrist because you want to paint a big divisive picture as a journalist so somebody will give you the front page.

With the changing of administrations, a policy regarding lowering the prices of insulin has been put on pause, although this policy put in motion by the Trump administration wouldn’t have affected the broader population of those that depend on insulin, what can you say as an advocate for diabetics for the future of policies regarding insulin? Do you believe the Biden administration will prioritize an actual change in the way insulin is sold and distributed? 

I think it just can’t be as simple as lowering the price of insulin, we have to look at the whole picture. We live in a country that’s one of the wealthiest in the world and yet we’re one of the unhealthiest populations in the world. Forty percent of American adults are obsese and eighteen percent are morbidly obese. I think if politicians just did their jobs instead of trying to demonize an industry, they could work with big pharma. Look at how quickly Pfizer came out with a vaccine. I see the private sector do great things and politicians complain about it vociferously but can’t even put together a website to get people vaccinated. Big pharma has saved my life repeatedly. We’re a backwards country. Wilford Brimley was a big spokesperson for diabetes and couldn’t even pronounce the disease. We don’t have fair and balanced journalism, it’s a bunch of people screaming at each other. 

As a self-described media guru, what does your work look like in the digital landscape? How do your skills of being a TV news personality, writer, and broker fit together?

Up until 2020 I was on television three days a week and on the radio constantly so I’m hoping to reinvent myself right now and I’m going to start doing that by writing less newsy pieces and start generating more blog posts. I noticed the last piece I wrote about Nostradamus and Irving Berlin got me a huger response than I got writing for one outlet like Newsmax or Fox News so perhaps it’s incumbent upon me and other writers to find the best way to reach their audience which isn’t necessarily the old-school methodology. So I’m going to have to try new things.

Are there any upcoming projects you’re working on now that you’d like to share? Where can people find your work?

They can go to RobTaub.com, there’s lots of material there and older videos. I’m doing some things in conjunction with diabetes and work as an influencer for Abbott labs. I wear a continuous glucose monitor on my arm that helps me with diabetes. I’m still doing work with the American Heart Association and I find that work extremely fulfilling. And prior to the pandemic I was going to conferences around the country and speaking about diabetes and heart health. We have to see how the vaccine will allow us back into society. I don’t think everything should be done in a Zoom meeting, there’s nothing better than meeting people person to person and I hope to be going to conferences in the future.