Taibbi takes CBS' Lara Logan to the woodshed

Playing devil's advocate: How do we know that Hastings didn't, as well?

The actually answer is, yes, we all have. But usually with people with whom we have a day-to-day rapport with and kind of understand the rhythms of what is on and off the record.

If I got access instead to, say, Tiger Woods' inner-circle for a day, or Peyton Manning's, or Nick Saban's, you better believe every word is on the record unless specifically stated that it isn't.

An example of something like this I can recall in sports a few years ago was Ozzie Guillen said something off the cuff in New York that was derogatory toward gays, I believe, and no one reported it but tthe national guy there for a hit-and-run. Think Mariotti and some others called out the White Sox beat pack on their enabling. I may have some of the details wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was Guillen.

 

Guess I'm not sure what your parallel is here.

 

My point is it's common. If you quote everything, good for you.

If you don't, it doesn't necessarily make you a bad journalist. Though I think you can get into a habit of being a sanitizer and that's not good.

 

My point was that, yes, I have, just as we all have.

But that I think it's different when you're covering a beat than when you're showing up in a fly-on-the-wall/immersion journalist situation.

I mean, imagine "Moneyball" without the scenes and casual conversations.

 

It goes deeper than that, but it's part of the problem.

Rolling Stone is a music mag. Get that right, quit giving hacks free publicity because they're backed by Disney, then resume the National Affairs stuff.

 

We've talked about this a lot with the Tiger/Jordan stuff. If you're the beat guy, there better be some payoff down the road if you're withholding stuff. Otherwise you're just carrying their water just to carry it. Are you getting an exclusive, productive, news-breaking one-on-one with Tiger if you don't write that he called Mickelson a pussy? A lot of beat guys seem to think "Well, I have to be on this beat awhile, so writing negative things about Tiger is a non-starter, because he IS THE BEAT." But so what if Tiger shuts you down? He already grants no access to anyone.

Sure, it's definitely different to show up out of nowhere and write what you see. But there are a lot of people -- and this is Taibbi's point -- who seem more interested in protecting the people they're covering and being their friends than they are serving the readers.

In Hastings case, there is no bigger story than McCrystal criticizing the president, unless he learned McCrystal was going to lead a military coup and overthrow Obama or some shit. To me, McCrystal talked the way he did because he'd never been seriously rebuked for anything he'd done previously.

The dude STRAIGHT UP LIED about Pat Tillman and WAS INVOLVED IN A COVER-UP and got promoted. He ripped Joe Biden in a speech and nothing happened. Living in that Afghanistan bubble, he began to feel invincible. He couldn't seem to shut up, and it finally cost him.

Anyone really think Hastings was the first reporter McCrystal and his aides bitched to about Biden and the others in the State Department? Hell no.

 

Mariotti: habitual agitator of Oz and the Sox.

Old habits die hard.

 

I'm thinking less of someone like Tiger and more something like covering an MLB or NBA team. At some point, you have to be able to have a conversation with people about opponents' weaknesses or the tools of the trade or, hell, what movie they watched last night, without it ending up in tomorrow's paper. A lot of it ends up serving your readers because it deepens your expertise and understanding of the league and the game. And some of it is just simple human courtesy and survival. I think this is much, much, much different, by the way, than what Lara Logan is advocating.

 

I understand this and it' can be a tough call. You also can get into the habit of ignoring "distractions."

That's why I can easily see some beat guys not even blinking when a dude like Ozzie says someone is a "faggot," while a parachuter would leap all over it.

 

I'm sure Taibbi screwed up some details, but didn't a ton of business bloggers, not to mention Taibbi himself, take down McArdle for faulty reasoning here? I remember she got grilled in her comments section because she kept responding to her critics and wound up apologizing for something.

Later, Taibbi wrote this about her:

P.S. A friend of mine reminded me of this — over the summer, the Atlantic’s Randian blowhard Megan McArdle wrong a long criticism of my Goldman, Sachs piece. In making her case, McArdle in one part was trying to argue that I was naively painting all derivatives with the same brush, her point being that CDOs and CDS are nothing like, say, rate swaps. Which of course they aren’t, but that’s not the point; the similarity is in the fact that they’re not regulated at all. In any case, she writes:

To give you a flavor of what I mean, Taibbi rants about how we knew derivatives were bad bad BAD! because they’d gone so badly wrong before… But it’s not clear how much derivatives regulation would have helped any of these three companies. Gibson was defrauded by its bankers. P&G wasn’t; they spent a great deal of money unwinding their positions when the Treasurer realized they had a lot of exposure on a bad bet on falling interest rates. Orange County, too, was making a massive, levered bet on a steep yield curve (roughly, a large difference between short and long term interest rates) that came undone when the yield curve flattened and interest rates rose. Moderately complex derivatives allowed its idiot financial manager to take somewhat larger bets, but you can take massive, money losing bets without them. At any rate, none of these derivatives have much to do with CDOs or CDSs; you might as well conflate stocks and bonds because they’re both “securities”. No one, as far as I know, is now proposing that we need to curtail the use of interest rate swaps.

McArdle wrote this after Jefferson County had blown up. This is just FYI. It’s on par with Charlie Gasparino calling the notion that Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein were regularly on the phone with each other brokering the AIG deal “the mother of all conspiracy theories.” The story about Blankfein and Paulson’s regular phone contacts during the AIG deal broke in the New York Times just days after Gasparino’s post.

 

I think he does point to himself as being an "elitist" in some sense. I've seen several several examples where he blatantly states that he is rich and has access to people and places most Americans don't. I find that a bit assholish too, but at least he's honest about it.

As far as working his way up, he cut his teeth in Russia working on the muckraking rag called The Exile (see my sig...).