I think Matt Taibbi is wrong about how the press treated Hillary about her Iraq vote (I think they went easy on her about it, though they did sandbag her in other ways), but there’s a lot of win in this piece:
When that does happen, when the press corps decides to abandon all restraint and go for the head shot, it usually tells us a lot more about the reporters’ bosses and what they’re thinking than it does about the reporters themselves. Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors.
[….]The tone for all this behavior is always set somewhere way up the corporate totem pole, and it always reflects some dreary combination of simple business considerations (i.e. what’s the best story and sells the most ads) and internalized political calculus (i.e. who is a “legitimate” candidate and who is an “insurgent” or a “second-tier” hopeful). It’s not that the reporters are making this judgment themselves, it’s that they have to listen to what the apparatus Up There is saying all day long — not just their bosses but the think-tank talking heads they interview for comments, the party insiders who buy them beers at night, the pollsters and so on.
[….]To illustrate the point via haiku:
Journos are pussies
Only attack when it’s safe
Lay off entrenched pols
EconWatcher
OT, but this piece on how the bailouts were selectively applied to entities where Goldman Sachs had exposure is an eye-opener (just wish the author had cleaned up some of his typos):
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/11/goldmanaig-conspiracy-theories-theres-a-reason-they-wont-go-away.html
Violet
His dad is Mike Taibbi, who is a journalist for NBC and went to Rutgers. Is he dissing his dad?
Xanthippas
Hell of a read. Here’s the best part:
I don’t follow the media like you guys do, but I think he’s right. Once the “conventional wisdom” is established, it’s only possible to pushback against it by demonstrating that it’s wrong in the most direct manner possible (even “conventional wisdom” will be defeated by solid poll numbers, or a political race won in defiance.) Now I happen to think that the teabaggers are a bunch of “knee-jerk loonies” but that doesn’t mean he’s not right about the power of big media to define events for us.
GReynoldsCT00
@Violet:
could be, he seems to take no prisoners
thomas
@Violet:
he’s not dissing dad – just reporting the facts
r€nato
I don’t agree with everything Taibbi writes, but he has a larger metavalue – he’s a serious journalist and he doesn’t care if what he writes gets him disinvited from the cocktail party circuit.
Sly
There’s so much win in that paragraph alone that I would invoke some gamer-related colloquialism that all the kids are using these days, but I haven’t been up on the lingo since 2002, at the latest, and I’d prefer not to seem uncool.
Matt always knows how to put a smile on my face.
Corner Stone
He’s dead right about it. Hillary is the only politician who will ever be held to account for that vote.
Maude
@Corner Stone: How was she held to account? She’s SoS.
jeffreyw
What the media covers and how they cover it is really only half the story, and it has been so for longer than I’ve been paying any attention. The rest of the story (how I hate to quote that reactionary hack) is what they do not cover, and why. Hardly breaking any new ground with that observation, I know, and the reasons for it are myriad. Editorial decisions are often attributed to the corporate overlords’ spoken or unspoken wishes and this reading is too often correct. More often, I think it’s just a sad manifestation of the usual groupthink that affects so many closed cliques like that of the elite press corps.
DougJ
Hillary is the only politician who will ever be held to account for that vote.
Well, I think they all should be held accountable. You’re right they were tougher on Hillary than on anyone else about it. But that’s not saying much.
Notorious P.A.T.
How many post-election writeups by mainstream journalists mention that war vote as a big reason why she did not win the nomination? I can’t think of any. Just saying.
Morbo
@Corner Stone: True, but I think Taibbi is somewhat off base in claiming that it was the press that held her to account for it. Democratic primary voters held her to account for it while she was still the CW favorite for the press. They gave it some discussion in her campaign post mortem, but I don’t remember any of it before June.
REN
When Murdoch and others like him own most of the news outlets in this country, why are people surprised when they present corporate, re: Republican, slants to all their “news”?
El Cid
@Corner Stone:
I seem to remember a whole lot of discussion of John Kerry’s ‘voted for it before I voted against it’. I mean, in between discussions of whether or not people accusing John Kerry of having made up his Vietnam service records really had a role to play in the public sphere.
low-tech cyclist
Consecutive post titles from lefty 1960s songs!
gorillagogo
I read that yesterday and it was so good I had to go reread the whole thing again today. There can’t possibly be a more succinct description for the teabagger crowd than “the eternal asshole of white resentment”.
jwb
Palin’s been cut loose—he’s certainly right about that—but it’s not clear to me that it follows that the teabaggers have, though he’s correct to note they are being treated as much as a cash resource to be exploited as a voting block. I’m thinking the goopers are looking for a new leader for the teabaggers, one without Palin’s liabilities and deficiencies.
Rhoda
@Xanthippas
(1) The public option has consistently polled higher than health care and has broad support across the political spectrum; that isn’t outweighed by the lobbyists money, spin, and the politicos that have been bought off po-poing the public option. So no, poll numbers don’t work. And a mandate through an election doesn’t either: see Barack Obama. As soon as he won, the meme was that the media handed him this presidency and/or Wall Street killed McCain. So nothing kills conventional wisdom, it gets shifted for corporate reasons and journalists walk the corporate line.
(2) Taibbi is right that the gloves have come off for Palin; you can see the change in the coverage now versus the coverage in the campaign which while probbing they gave her a lot more credibility. She actually ended on a note that if she had stuck it out in Anchorage, I think the Party would have marked her as the next Bush. They could mold her, put a Gingrich as her running mate to actually run the country, and it’d be fine. But she cashed out and that pissed off a lot of people who’d been making the case for her. That’s what I think screwed her. The problem the Right has, they’re down to their hardcore base. They don’t have the ideological room to muzzle the Palin wing of the party because the party is the Palin wing. Those who aren’t crazy are right leaning independents (which is why Obama is down among them). And Micheal Steele has to kiss her ass while the GOP uses the MSM to stick shivs in Sarah. That also makes her stronger, through. It’s a massive circle jerk that leads to things like that dude in IL running for senate and seeking her blessing.
2010 is going to be fun. If the Democrats can get a jobs bill and health care BEFORE January, I think they’ll have small losses and keep a healthy majority. If they don’t and this bleeds into 2010 I think it’s a race to the bottom. We’ll see if GOP Palinsta crazy or DLCjerking coserva-corporasita democrats go down first in a race to the bottom.
The only folks I think are safe are coherent progressives. Folks like Dorgan who voted against the bailout and for health care and stimulus. He’s a deficit hawk and that irks me; but he’s been on the right side of these fights.
DBrown
@DougJ: No they (the media) didn’t. Hillary was running for President and her voting record on the war needed to be talked about – then she screwed up by back peddling and trying spin and just created a firestorm all by herself. Obama voted as he felt resulted in creating no story. The media did its job on that topic with Hillary but where total fuckards with GW running up to the Iraq war.
Unlike us, Hillary had more inside information on the Iraq intelligence and either blew it or really did support the war. Either way, she needed to explain her part and beliefs as Obama did. Her fault if the media saw thru her smoke screen and had questions. As both a member of congress and cadidate for the presidency, she should be vetted on this issue – that was fair.
neill
I dont think journalmalist are anywhere near pussies.
A pussy held you for nine months, nurtured you, had you grow and expand too hugeness, and then pushed your ass out into the world.
A god damn journamalist would be whining after the first week…they’re more like dicks…they just stick their little heads in and then ejaculate a little ink…
jwb
@Rhoda: If the economy still sucks next summer—and it looks like it will—the Dems will take big losses whether or not they pass health care and a jobs bill, though passing those items would no doubt mitigate the losses to some extent. But barring some game changer like a new war or a major terrorist attack, the big thing will be where the economy is next June.
I think it’s clear now that Obama administration miscalculated fairly badly on the stimulus (far too small), and the Dems will be paying a fairly steep price for that miscalculation. I would add that, given that the Dems have shown themselves almost incapable of governing, they actually deserve the losses, except that the losses are likely only to make things worse (as well as rewarding the bad behavior of the goopers).
New Yorker
It’s funny how Taibbi got blasted by tons of e-mail messages from the teabaggers for daring to criticize Lady Starbursts, just as he got blasted by tons of e-mail messages when he mocked the 9/11 truthers.
I imagine that it has to do with what the groups have in common: both are a collection of ill-educated, paranoid imbeciles who are pissed off about everything, so of course they’re going to react with hostility to anything negative written about them or their heroes.
woody
Maude:
Sos is NOT “Madame President,” nest paw?
Emma
BBrown: Well, I supported Hillary. And what pissed me off was that NOBODY in the other side was held responsible for anything. Not a question, not a remark, not a commentary that they had driven us into the ditch. In every election, the MSM has gotten more and more selective as to who they will attack — and it hasn’t been a Republican until now.
The thing about Palin is that in the eyes of the Villagers she’s the equivalent of Bill Clinton — a jumped up redneck who dares to think she can enter the hallowed halls of privilege and upset a few applecarts. They still want to beat Bill Clinton to a pulp and every few weeks someone like Mathews tries. And now they have a perfect target: unlike Clinton, she in uneducated, incurious, and appeals only to a subset of Americans that they despise.
If the ideas she spouses weren’t so noxious to this country, and if I didn’t believe that there’s a damn good chance she would end up a figurehead for someone even more noxious, I would be tempted to feel sorry for her.
Rhoda
@jwb
They did screw up. And the deficit talk didn’t help. But I think the self interest of the House democrats is going to save his ass. Nancy Pelosi is going to do a jobs bill. Harry Reid is going to get it through. And that will help.
I think that NYT story on the stimulus actually working was a good thing for the administration. To many reports had been buying the bullshit about canceling the stimulus. If the jobs bill passes and health care passes; the democrats can tell a story about the worst crisis since the depression was triggered by Republicans. That it’ll take more than a year to turn it around. And that they’ve done A, B, C to make life better…what have the Republicans done for you lately?
I think the VA election showed this clearly. Jobs is the mantra. And Democrats in passing a jobs bill, having done a stimulus, and done health care reform have real accomplishments to point to. What are the Republicans going to actually SAY? They can’t say the stimulus didn’t work. By all accounts, it should have been bigger. They can’t say we delievered jobs; they voted against them all. They delayed unemployment. They’ve been the party of No and I think that will hurt them in tight races.
It’s an anti incumbent year. But given the crazy in the GOP. Democrats can pull it out. If they put up wins to run on. That’s the IF, getting these bills. I think that’s the lesson of NY 23. If that doesn’t happen, it’s a race to the bottom.
JMHO
woody
Btw: It is a base canard to claim the Press “tells” the populace what to think. Nobody believes that.
The truth is slightly more sophisticated, nuanced:
See?
Notorious P.A.T.
I see newspapers like the Washington Post saying they are going to dedicate more resources to covering what teabaggers care about, so I don’t think they are being hung out to dry.
Why oh why
Obama voted as he felt
Obama didn’t vote on the Iraq war; he wasn’t a Senator then. In fact, judging by his decisions since January (or even before the election but after getting the nomination, like on FISA), it is pretty obvious he would have voted for the war had he been in the Senate, with much embarassed double-talk later, just like Clinton, Kerry or Biden (remember him?) did.
BethanyAnne
@Sly: What yer looking for is WTFPWN. Perhaps even WTFPWNBBQ. :-)
MBunge
“I think it’s clear now that Obama administration miscalculated fairly badly on the stimulus (far too small), and the Dems will be paying a fairly steep price for that miscalculation.”
It’s only a miscalculation if there was a solidly practical way to get a bigger stimulus. I’m not sure that was the case.
Mike
lol
The press is a problem but frankly, they’re more of the kick you when you’re down variety than taking you down kind. They love winners and nothing shuts them up better, as Obama proved, than winning.
Dean’s campaign was a mess and his third place finish in Iowa was proof of it. Scream or no scream, he wasn’t going any further. To put it another way, the media may have pulled the plug, but he (or rather Trippi) was the one that drove into the ditch in the first place.
Crap candidates blame the media for their loss even though they didn’t fundraise (well or at all), didn’t hire staff, didn’t open offices, didn’t contact voters, didn’t run ads, etc, etc.
That’s not to say there aren’t cases where they didn’t go for the jugular ahead of time (see Gore in 2000), but most problems politicos have with the press are self-inflicted. If Palin hadn’t been pwned by Katie Fucking Couric (amongst others), she’d have gotten more respect from the press. But she fucked up and dug her own grave before the media buried her in it.
burnspbesq
I rarely agree with Taibbi about anything, and in my view he is just as guilty of careerism as those he professes to disdain.
Is there any mainstream journalistic outlet less likely to require rigorous sourcing and fact-checking of his crap, and more likely to pay handsomely for it, than Rolling Stone? Didn’t think so.
The fact that he’s on your side doesn’t make his writing any better, doesn’t make his unwillingness to get sources on the record any less reprehensible, and doesn’t make him less of an asshole. And it doesn’t mean you should give him a pass for trying to pass off his journamalism as the genuine article.
Paris
What is this constant qualifying a link to Taibbi? (I think Matt Taibbi is wrong , I don’t agree with everything Taibbi writes …)
I almost never see that done so consistently with any other writer?
Its getting a bit clubby. Was there a panel at a conference where everyone agreed to qualify every mention of Matt Taibbi?
Does he smell bad?
eemom
uh oh……is Taibbi gonna become the next “Sully” here at good BJ?
woody
That statement alone is enough to disqualify anything further you have to say from any claim to serious attention.
Thanks for playing…G’bye!
Why oh why
Is there any mainstream journalistic outlet less likely to require rigorous sourcing and fact-checking of his crap, and more likely to pay handsomely for it, than Rolling Stone? Didn’t think so.
I don’t think any newspaper pays “handsomely”, but as far as poor “fact-checking” goes, see the Washington Post, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker… before the Iraq War.
kay
@burnspbesq:
I agree. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Populism breeds hucksters. It just does. There’s no reason to think they only exist on the Right, unless you’re under the illusion that “your side” is inherently more ethical.
And I don’t.
“Populist” is a smart career move right now.
Xanthippas
Well, nobody on our side happens to regard Taibbi in the same manner as a reporter for the Washington Post or NY Times, etc., etc. He’s somewhere between an actual reporter and a pundit, and we’re all cool with that (him being an asshole is irrelevant, though entertaining.)
And anyway, no less than the Columbia Journalism Review happens to think that Taibbi is worth reading. Taibbi may have issues here and there with fact-checking, but he gets props from us for trying to tell a straighter story than the rest of the financial press about Goldman. We don’t like him because he’s on our side, which actually is a pretty stupid and insulting thing to say.
eemom
why is Taibbi an asshole? Honest question, I know almost nothing about him.
rob!
So DougJ, following your post title, who’s “Miss Lonely” in this scenario? Palin? That would probably make Beck the siamese cat sitting on the diplomat’s shoulder.
Why oh why
why is Taibbi an asshole? Honest question, I know almost nothing about him.
Because he uses a lot of naughty words and he said very bad things about all politicians (including Obama) except perhaps Sanders.
I think this article is an excellent introduction to his shrill tone and impolite behavior:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7539869/four_amendments__a_funeral
Mark S.
@eemom:
He uses bad words.
Also, I don’t know if Taibbi is better or worse than the average reporter when it comes to anonymous sourcing, but I think it’s a little naive to think that you can always write a very illuminating piece and never use anonymous sourcing. Some people have jobs they could easily lose if they went on record. There are a lot of cases where the reporter is being played, so it helps to not have a completely clueless reporter.
Maude
@woody: C’est la vie.
Paula
@ 39
“And anyway, no less than the Columbia Journalism Review happens to think that Taibbi is worth reading. Taibbi may have issues here and there with fact-checking, but he gets props from us for trying to tell a straighter story than the rest of the financial press about Goldman. We don’t like him because he’s on our side, which actually is a pretty stupid and insulting thing to say.”
So what are you saying, that Taibbi “gets props from you” because you think his story is “straight” despite the fact that he has issues with fact checking? You are, in fact, excusing his lack of rigorous journalism because he presents a story “on your side”.
Like Taibbi’s “populism” all you want, but don’t expect too much sympathy when his methods of procuring and presenting information harms the integrity of the ideas that supposedly you (and he) support. An idea is only as good as the people who present it, and progressives are going to get into a lot of unnecessary trouble if Taibbi is being hailed as some kind of intellectual guidepost and his reporting becomes one of their faces in the mainstream.
geg6
@burnspbesq:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
This is so clueless I’m gonna guess it’s snark. Because if it’s not, it exposes an complete ignorance of the MSM and of Rolling Stone’s journalistic tradition. Not to mention what it pays it’s journalists.
Oh, and Hunter Thompson was a hack, too. Also.
licensed to kill time
From Country Joe and the Fish to Dylan. I love this blog. It makes reading all the political crap practically palatable instead of provoking suicidal tendencies. Y’all provide a great service to DFH’s everywhere.
@geg6: I loved reading HST and wish he was still around to poke holes in these media buffoons and slimy politicos. I miss him.
Cat
@kay:
Is there a bad time to be a populist in a democracy?
Xanthippas
Did you bother to read the CJR article I linked to? It details Taibbi’s errors, which are minor and have more to do with his flair for hyperbole. It’s ridiculous to say that Taibbi’s reporting “harms the integrity” of an idea like financial accountability and transparency, the very point of his writing.
I’m trying to believe that you and burnspbesq are actually bothered by more than Taibbi’s polemicism and tone, but you’re not making a very good argument here.
Boots Day
Is there any mainstream journalistic outlet less likely to require rigorous sourcing and fact-checking of his crap, and more likely to pay handsomely for it, than Rolling Stone? Didn’t think so.
This is absolutely 100 percent backward. Rolling Stone fact-checks all its pieces with tremendous rigor. Taibbi spends literally hours with a fact-checker for every piece he writes.
Meanwhile, newspapers hardly fact-check at all.
Cat
@Paula:
Epic Failure at hiding your sociopathic tendencies and desire to suck up to those in power. A good idea is a good idea even if the crazy homeless guy on the corner is the person who came up with it.
Chuck Butcher
Knight-Ridder (McClatchy) got the run up to the Iraq War right. They got it right by using low level sources to draw a picture. Those sources, not surprisingly, wanted to remain anonymous. These were the powerless who lose a job and get blackballed and have nowhere to turn.
Journalism can be done and has been done and it can require anonymous sources who aren’t the big players looking for a free spin. It certainly does require support from its own business. Given the consolidation of media it seems less likely to happen.
geg6
@licensed to kill time:
Word. The loss of him and Molly Ivins are wounds from which American journalism/punditry will never recover. Thankfully, there are people like Taibbi and the Rude Pundit to minutely fill their footsteps.
licensed to kill time
@geg6: I like how you added the qualifier “minutely” because it’s so true. HST created some enormous s h o e s to fill, he was such a unique and authentic voice. I remember reading him back when RS was an unstapled folded newspaper (in the bathtub it was an iffy proposition) and he practically gave you an acid flashback, he was so trippy.
Mark S.
@Chuck Butcher:
You made that point better than I did.
I know one guy who was in intelligence, and he told me most of the non-political people in the CIA knew the Iraqi WMD’s were bullshit. These guys can’t go public without losing their jobs, but it would have been nice to have heard more from them.
burnspbesq
@geg6:
HST was sui generis.
I think of Taibbi as the succesor to Greider. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.
Wile E. Quixote
@Boots Day
Are you fucking high? Rolling Stone let that self-righteous asshole Bobby Kennedy Jr, publish his bullshit “Deadly Immunity” scare story about thimoserol and the dangers of vaccines. When Rolling Stone has an axe to grind and a good story to tell, and scary vaccines that make children autistic because of evil, profiteering companies is the kind of thing that Rolling Stone just loves, especially when written by Robert “feel sorry for me because my asshole Dad who wiretapped MLK got gunned down” Kennedy Jr. then facts go right out the window.
I like Taibbi, but face it, when a story serves their agenda Rolling Stone is no better at fact checking writers like Kennedy than the Washington Post is for columnists like George Will.
geg6
@burnspbesq:
Well, yes. As was Molly I. But they are dead.
As a Rolling Stone reader from the very beginning (I have an original copy of the John Lennon “How I Won The War” first edition sent to me by my brother who was in college at the time), I have had plenty of time and opportunity to size up their star writers. No one can ever come close to HST. However, comparing Taibbi to Greider is much too harsh. Though I guess I should be glad you didn’t call him another PJ O’Rourke. Is Matt as good at the outrage and snark as HST? Hell, no. But neither is he as bad as you seem to think he is. I guess I don’t understand why you think he’s so bad. I’ve read a lot of Taibbi’s stuff, including his books. It’s all pretty damn good stuff and it is pretty obvious to me that HST was a huge influence on him. Their styles are quite similar, their sense of the outrage at what passes for the ruling establishment in this country is pretty much exactly the same, and their anger is righteous and completely on target. Has Taibbi made minor mistakes in his writing? Hell, yes. But fewer than almost all the major players like WaPo and NYT (lets not even get into cable) and not at all in the overall point of whatever topic on which he’s writing. He seems to be trying to overlay traditional reporting with the stylistic anger and outrageousness that HST did so well. I’d rather read him than almost anybody in the MSM because he gets it right. Just as HST did. It’s not necessarily about getting every single factoid correct (and in financial reporting, this would seem impossible), but it’s about getting down to the nut of it. And Taibbi does that better and more effectively than almost anyone else out there. I think HST would consider him a worthy accolyte.
licensed to kill time
__
I was trying to compose something about this, the way HST got right to the core or essence of a thing, but you did it so much better, geg6.
kay
@Cat:
It’s a cottage industry right now. There’s a lot of anger and that can be tapped into. Is being tapped into, and you’ll hate this, but the Angry Populist Meme is also a growth industry on the Right, see: Glen Beck and Lou Dobbs.
I’m just questioning where all that heat gets you.
Paula
C@t-hole
Whatever. A year ago Taibbi was penning misogynist rants against Hillary Clinton for a magazine that went wholesale for Obama. I bet RS was totally selling, those few months, though.
geg6
@Paula:
Misogynist rants? That’s not how I read it. And I’m a feminist.
burnspbesq
@Xanthippas:
OK, I’ll go one more round.
The polemicism and tone are bothersome, because they are offputting to big segments of the audience. If you have something important to say, and you want to get your message across to as many people as possible, it’s counterproductive to gratuitously piss people off.
But there’s more to it than that.
Let’s just hypothetically assume that I am the last person on earth who isn’t convinced that Goldman is a criminal enterprise. I don’t think it’s too much to ask of Taibbi that he go beyond “because I say so” or “they did nasty ugly things that appear on their face to be legal but that I think shouldn’t be,” and show actual instances of criminal behavior to back up that claim.
The libel laws in this country ensure that journos can say pretty much whatever they want about anything and anybody, and they’ll never be held accountable if they are wrong. I’m OK with that, but I wish that journos would exercise the enormous power they have a bit more responsibly.
Paula
@ 49
Taibbi’s reporting “harms the integrity” of an idea like financial accountability and transparency, the very point of his writing.
You know, it’s not Taibbi’s ideas that I fault — it’s more like I can get the same info from other sources (Harper’s, for instance) without the “flair for hyperbole” or *cough*hack covering his bad prose and simple-minded politics in swear words*cough*.
Except that it’s Taibbi I see on the nightly news. Making hack-work of stuff I actually agree with.
Paula
@ 62
How nice for you then. Reading RS during the 2008 elections was the worst, and while I wasn’t one of those people who saw misogyny directed against HRC @ every turn, I could reliably pick up an article written by Taibbi and rethink my position.
And his analysis was simplistic suckage, IMO. But I bet it was plenty flattering to his Obama-supporting RS readers.
Paula
“If you have something important to say, and you want to get your message across to as many people as possible, it’s counterproductive to gratuitously piss people off.”
This is my problem w/ people who write like Taibbi. On some level, they are not writing to convince skeptical people so much as they are flattering their choir’s sense of moral outrage. A lot of this information is damning without any need for hyperbole, and works better without it because it’s very important that the connections and ideas be the absolute clearest that they could be. (See Hersh, Seymour. Cole, Juan. Lithwick, Dahlia.)
But the reason Taibbi is being promoted on blogs and on TV news is because people are attracted to his hyperbole. Not because his writing is good, or that his ideas are unique, or that he’s performing an important advocacy role to the general public.
licensed to kill time
@Paula: You know, nobody’s strapping you to a waterboard and pouring Taibbi down your throat. You could just not read him if you don’t like his style.
Chuck Butcher
@Paula:
As a frequent critic of people’s ability to string words together, I find a lot of Taibi’s writing quite good in that respect. If you want a report, go to the SEC documents – not many will since that’s as interesting as a root canal.
You seem to be calling it “preaching to the choir” which may be accurate – and the fault with that is what? If you think most people really want an economist’s analysis you sure aren’t looking at the audience. The people who read and “get” Taibi are the people who will carry that message, not Joe Schmoe on the street.
Are you the sort of person who thinks most of MSNBC’s programing isn’t aimed at a niche market?
Chuck Butcher
@Paula:
You’re real sure about that?
mak
Taibbi’s work is much closer to that of HST than it is to Grieder. Like HST, Taibbi gets sides of stories that others don’t, and provides solid analysis of big subjects. But lots of guys can do that (including Grieder). What puts Taibbi in HST’s league is the rare combination of analytical insight and belly-laughs born of righteous anger and a powerful pen. IMHO, Taibbi’s better at this kind of long-form journalism than anyone since HST, and that would include PJ O’Rourke, who was pretty good at it (at least until he became a Republican). I won’t get carried away and compare Taibbi to Twain or Mencken, but I will say this: Taibbi’s is a relatively young guy who’s just hitting his stride, and who has thus far demonstrated neither the self-destructive tendencies of Raoul Duke (not as much, at least), nor the ass-kissing credulousness of the rest of the Villagers. That could change, of course. But if he keeps growing in the direction he has thus far, he could be one of the greats.
Boots Day
I like Taibbi, but face it, when a story serves their agenda Rolling Stone is no better at fact checking writers like Kennedy than the Washington Post is for columnists like George Will.
You can pretend you know what’s going on here if you want, but I’m telling you, the magazine checks every fact in every Matt Taibbi article. Just because you don’t like what someone is saying does not make it factually wrong.
Paula
“You seem to be calling it “preaching to the choir” which may be accurate – and the fault with that is what? … The people who read and “get” Taibi are the people who will carry that message, not Joe Schmoe on the street.”
Really? Well, good golly gosh — pardon my ignorance of this great public outcry instigated by Taibbi’s article that has unseated GS from the highest levels of power. Last time I checked they were still rich m’fers on the lam from any kind of accountability.
Also:
“But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.”
“Gangster” capitalism? A homework excuse and a brown-bag lunch. Such compelling (and compellingly inconsistent) metaphors. Such an original use of language. Such graceful phrasing.
Seriously. You made me re-read the whole goddamn thing and I’m realizing that Taibbi’s attempts at injecting the piece with hyperbolic language (“vampire squid”) makes the rest of his prose even more leaden by proximity.
He has plenty of facts here, more facts and history than his pieces for the 08 elections. But it really does come closer to a list of factoids than a compelling story because Taibbi doesn’t really have anything more complex to say than “businessmen are greedy and the gov’t is corrupt”.
“The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bankholding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn’t a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. ”
Like an undergraduate reading Marx for the first time, like, ever. I mean, for all that research, is this the absolute deepest level of analysis that he could get to?
burnspbesq
@Boots Day:
And you know this how?
Corner Stone
@DBrown:
What the fuck are you talking about?
Wile E. Quixote
@Boots Day
Boots Day
So you’re saying that they fact check everything in Taibbi’s articles but not in RFK Jrs. Because the thimerosal hypothesis is bullshit and outside of the minds of the nuts in the anti-vaxxer movement, attention seeking scum like RFK Jr, and Jenny McCarthy and the frauds who are making serious bank by taking advantage of the parents of autistic children the thimerosal hypothesis is as completely discredited as Iraqi WMDs. But hey, that doesn’t matter, it was RFK Jr, writing the article, and he cares a lot, and his daddy got snuffed by Sirhan Sirhan, and he’s got vocal dystonia, so we should just let him spew his bullshit.
The fact that RFK Jr. was allowed to publish Deadly Immunity shows that if the story is good enough Rolling Stone is entirely willing to toss anything resembling journalistic integrity out the window. Maybe they fact check Taibbi, but only because he’s not famous.
Wile E. Quixote
@burnspbesq
Why do you say that? Have you ever read Greider’s Secrets of the Temple. If you name one other book about the Federal Reserve that is as thorough and meticulous and SotT I’d love to read it.
mobutu's rotting corpse
The thing that makes Taibbi indispensable to life is his residence in Russia. The very few people making sense these days are people who have seen and dealt with the kind of metastasizing corruption prevalent in developing countries and transforming economies (c.f. Simon Jonhson at baselinescenario.com, for example). Virtually everybody else is crippled by idealistic delusions about America because they can’t see that this country has spent a decade undeveloping and shitting out everything it ever tried to stand for.
Chuck Butcher
@Paula:
You seem to be mistaking the rhetoric you read on blogs with what gets published as far as distribution is concerned. Ah well, I think Michener is beyond tedious and a lot of people think he’s great. You don’t like the metaphors and you seem to think he’s stating the obvious or what?
You’ve had exactly what to say on this subject? I get you don’t like that he picked on Hillary, but you seem to be missing from anything other than this critique of Taibi. So what have you got to say about investment banks that I won’t take as your sudden exposure to Smith? Or hell, Marx?
Paula
Butcher, you seem to be missing from most of the threads I read. Should I ask you for your credentials?
As for what *I* have to say about investment banks, the point is that I don’t have much to say other than they seem to be driven by greed and profit and that their copious amounts of earning power have gotten them a place in gov’t. Reading people like Taibbi is supposed to get me beyond that. I never said Taibbi was wrong, just simplistic. If you say that it’s his job to explain to numb-nuts like me how I’m being screwed, why is it that there’s nothing I know after reading the article that I couldn’t have made a reasonable stab at before reading it?
I quoted from the published article in RS, for which he has been given awards of some sort, and not his blog.