Whether it’s his appearances on The Bill Maher Show during the 2008 election or his piercing writing about the financial crisis:
The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Taibbi has just returned from his honeymoon and has fired up his blog at Rolling Stone. His latest is a scathing tear-down of David Brooks’ recent criticism of the Rolling Stone piece that lead to General McChrystal’s resignation:
When a Bill Clinton or a Larry Craig steps into the Rupert Murdoch bear trap by getting blown by someone he shouldn’t, ratings go through the roof; and since most editors no longer have the discretion to sit on these things because corporate bean-counters will drop the ax if those sorts of profit opportunities are passed up, we get tons and tons of that sort of reporting.
What we get very little of is reporting that asks difficult questions about complicated issues and makes a sincere effort to explain to the public who’s really running this country and how they go about doing it. Brooks would have us believe that we’ve been overrun by Pentagon Papers-esque stories and Watergate-style investigative reporting, but the reality is that most of the major news organizations have gutted their editorial departments to the bone, to the point where long-form investigative journalism doesn’t really exist apart from a few scattered outlets here and there.
Taibbi Blog | Taibbi on Twitter
For more reading enjoyment read his fiery excoriation of CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan. Many thanks to Jann Wenner for giving the dude a job.
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