I appreciate your protective feeling for HN, but you're simply wrong about Taibbi. We could lose 90% of our journalists, those whose efforts are primarily focused toward sticking to their assigned scripts, and we would be both better-off and better-informed. Taibbi is not among that 90%. HN is also not about sticking to the script.
In addition to all of rayiner's points (which I agree with), I think you vastly overrate Taibbi's journalism. Just because he attacks a lot of things you happen to be against, it doesn't make him a good journalist. He routinely exaggerates the facts, gets his economics wrong, and is otherwise misleading in his writing.
Wow, if only there were some forum in which these issues might be addressed, where you could write precisely the problems you've found with his reporting rather than blanket smears that mean nothing to anyone without all the background you're imagining we have. Perhaps it would be a forum in which Taibbi himself would be likely to see those specific complaints, and could if he chose respond in some fashion that might be educational for all of us...
Or, I guess we could use the opportunity to police his literary style.
ps. I'm giggling now because I'm thinking of all the journalists whose economics have been "right", and the number of days over which that has been the case...
You didn't in any way address what Harry or Rayiner said. You just "giggled" at the suggestion that anyone might have legitimate problems with Taibbi's reporting on its own merits.
Dude just look at the words. I was giggling at the idea that we should get economics advice from journalists. I certainly don't get mine from Taibbi.
From Harry, we have:
He routinely exaggerates the facts, gets his economics wrong, and is otherwise misleading in his writing.
For discussion's sake I'll stipulate to the middle clause, but if the first and last were so "routine", someone in this entire thread would have given a single concrete example, which I or anyone else might "address". If such an example had appeared while Taibbi was still hanging around, he might have responded. Didn't happen. Instead we have this tedious whinging about how terrible his literary style is. The writing in question was clearly satirical to me in '99, and it hasn't grown any less clearly so since then.
You won't like all comedians. You won't like all musicians. You won't like all artists. You won't like all journalists. Tastes differ, and this ham-handed attempt to police tastes in journalism on HN has not succeeded.
