TheKing:

Taibbi is great. If you call him a hack, back it up. The guy is the best in the business.

See, when I read things like this, I'm forced to conclude that either 1) we maintain very different definitions of what it means to be a quality journalist or 2) people aren't subjecting stories with which they agree to any sort of intellectual scrutiny. Matt Taibbi is many things, but it strikes me as disingenuous to call him "the best in the business".

One thing I must get out of the way: I think the emphasis of political journalism on "fact checks" is overwrought. If I were to flip on Bill O'Reilly right now, no doubt he'd be railing on some inane factual inconsistency on last night's episode of the Daily Show. Tune into tonight's episode of Rachel Maddow, and you'll be spending your evening listening to Rachel rant about whatever today's token factual mistake on Fox was. None of this adds any value to political discourse, it's just a convenient method of killing 10 minutes of your airtime while your target audience continues to nod their head.

Matt Taibbi is an editorialist. His job is to write about factual events and present an argument that is thought-provoking, intellectually rigorous and surprising. Yet, never do I read about the goings-on in the world and think, "I wonder what Matt Taibbi thinks about this..." After reading one or two Taibbi articles, it should be a foregone conclusion.

Taibbi is adept at laying out the left-wing party line on any issue of national importance, especially if it involves Wall Street. But that has nothing to do with being a good journalist. Just because you think Matt is an effective purveyor of your own opinions doesn't mean that he is "the best in the business". It means you agree with him. And given that you do, there is no better writer in the business to get your blood boiling and mind racing.

As a Libertarian, I particularly enjoy reading content on the Mises Institute. I find the analysis of global events "spot-on", and the bits of humor resonate. But just because I'm most amenable to editorials on Mises.org doesn't mean that they produce the highest-quality journalism. Simply that they are eloquent in their presentation of the Libertarian viewpoint.

Of course, you'll never log onto Mises.org and think, "I wonder what Mises will think about the government shutdown..." If you're a Libertarian, it's a place to visit to read something with which you already agree. And that's precisely the space that Matt Taibbi fills at Rolling Stone: a safe haven for those who feel Wall Street is full of greedy brutes who will stop at nothing to wrest society of any vestiges of honesty and equality. And that's fine, but it rules him out - in my book - for the title of "best in the business".

An article of Taibbi's that both comes to mind and illustrates this point is a piece he wrote during the election last year titled, "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital" (don't you just already know you're in for a challenging piece of original perspectives and quality journalism?).

Taibbi's description of Romney:

Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal.

...

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Let's leave aside the fact that these two paragraphs read as though they were written by someone who just discovered the hyphen while walking home from his first seminar in "Written Punditry 101" (and, seriously, "shimmering pearl of perfect political hyprocrisy"? "Chameleonic champion"?? Can you imagine clumsier uses of alliteration?). The sheer volume of rhetoric stuffed into those two paragraphs literally make it difficult to read. Taibbi has so tightly packed his off-the-cuff liberal witticisms that I can barely follow the sentence structure.

The article on Romney is more incendiary than a Rush Limbaugh tirade on the pitfalls of Obama's presidency. There's no way you can read that article with any semblance of critical thinking and believe you are consuming a thought-provoking, quality piece of journalism. It's a mindless straw man into which his left-wing readership can sink their teeth and continue to reaffirm their political beliefs in the liberal echo chamber of Rolling Stone's current affairs pages.

It's just another version of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, etc., etc., etc. And there's nothing fresh about that.

EDIT: So I just read the Taibbi article linked in Eddie's piece. Seriously? A conspiracy case about pensions putting money in alternative investment vehicles? This is WSO, there should be no need to point out individual instances of misleading rhetoric with which this piece is rife, per usual.