This Eric Martin post reminds me that a number of you have asked me what I thought of Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs. What I think, sadly, is 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. The whole thing dissolves into the kind of conspiracy theory he so ably lampooned in The Great Derangement. The result is something that's not even wrong. It's just incoherent. ...
To make these charges stick, Taibbi needs to posit a ludicrous level of naivite among institutional investors. Being satisfied with sloppy answers, he doesn't talk about, say, Goldman's role in the AIG collapse, or how you build a banking system without putting bankers in charge of it. He doesn't prove anything except that Matt Taibbi knows little about how the financial system works.A lot of laymen, and not a few financial writers, like Taibbi because he's willing to take the piss out of self-important bankers. But you can learn about how the banking system works without being coopted by the bankers--look at Michael Lewis, whose Liar's Poker remains a classic twenty years on. What you can't do is build cartoon villains. Felix Salmon isn't overly friendly to Wall Street. But he doesn't write rubbish.The more dangerous thing is that Taibbi makes a lot of people feel like they finally understand how they were conned. Taibbi's facile use of technical terms, his lengthy explanation of little-known secrets that have been endlessly rehashed on every financial page for going on a decade, gives people the illusion that they have acquired valuable information about the financial crisis. They haven't. They've acquired a bunch of disconnected vignettes.Which is not to say that I disagree with Taibbi's project. Wall Street is an arrogant beast that more than held up its half of the devil's bargain which drove us into our current ugly straits. Bankers who thought they were geniuses were deceived by models that assumed away the possibility of a second great depression. They made a terrifying amount of money doing it. And now that the taxpayers have bailed them out at considerable expense, we don't even get a goddamn fruit basket. Instead they merrily go along paying themselves gigantic bonuses for the singular feat of not driving our economy entirely back to the stone age. I think some populist rage is more than warranted.But just because Taibbi, or Sarah Palin, has a legitimate grievance, it does not follow that everything they say is thereby legitimate. How you press that grievance matters. And the right way to do it is carefully, honestly, and with a deep respect for the value of knowledge, even if you disagree with those who are purveying it.
you are the media you consume.
