Ordinarily I'd make an effort to keep an open mind -- even if I'm being asked to believe that Rolling Stone could print a piece that gave Ivy League JD/MBAs an

Ordinarily I'd make an effort to keep an open mind -- even if I'm being asked to believe that Rolling Stone could print a piece that gave Ivy League JD/MBAs and mathematical finance PhD's anything close to a fair hearing without royally pissing off their core audience of people who pay money to read about rock stars and Paris Hilton. But this author has a history of oversimplification and allegation-slinging that almost makes you believe his real goal is to sell that audience it can get righteously worked-up over. Here are two blurbs about the piece Taibbi wrote about Goldman Sachs in July, from journalists at opposite ends of the political spectrum. First, progressive Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine: Someone also asked [Ezra Klein] about Matt Taibbi's takedown of Goldman Sachs in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I finally got around to reading it the other day, and my verdict is simple: it was terrible. Taibbi wrote a terrific article about AIG a couple of months ago, but the Goldman piece was just phoned in, a long series of blustery assertions with essentially nothing to back up any of them. If he wants to claim that Goldman was the wizard behind the curtain of everything from the dotcom boom to last year's oil spike, he really needs to produce some evidence for it instead of just saying so. (http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/07/furloughs-and-perks http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/07/furloughs-and-perk...) And libertarian Megan McArdle of the Atlantic: I think, sadly, [that] Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism. He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites. Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don't offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system. Confronted with this, Taibbi doesn't back away from the narrative form, or apply it to smaller questions where it is more appropriate, as William Cohan did in House of Cards. Instead, he grabs whoever's nearest to hand and builds them up into a gigantic straw villian, which he proceeds to bash with a handful of recently acquired technical terms that he clearly doesn't quite understand. It's not that everything he says is wrong, but the bits that are true aren't interesting, and the bits that are interesting aren't true. (http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/matt_taibbi_gets_his_sarah_pal.php http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/matt_ta...)