Matt Taibbi is the best political writer of his generation. Unfortunately, that’s not worth writing home about. He’s a gifted writer, to be sure, but he’s lazy. Yeah, lazy. Groomed to carry on the gonzo tradition begun by Hunter S. Thompson at Jann Wenner‘s Rolling Stone, Taibbi has done that adequately. But it’s the difference between a cover band knowing the originator’s songs and one that gets the originator’s music. Sadly, Taibbi seems to be content in the former category.
His recent hit piece on Michele Bachmann is indicative. Where Thompson would disappear—and I mean totally drop off the map—regularly for months at a time while working on an article, Taibbi stays home and surfs the web, consulting the Google oracle from time to time. Little in “Michele Bachmann’s Holy War” is new. It all looks new because it’s all so thinly sourced. In fact, not until this became a story did Rolling Stone even so much as provide links to the original sources on its web version of Taibbi’s story.
Minnesota bloggers, most notably Dump Bachmann and Ripple in Stillwater, have adequately tilled this particular soil.
Abe Sauer, writing for the Awl, does a real fine job of taking down Taibbi. Sauer talked to Eric Bates, Rolling Stone‘s executive editor; Bates claimed he cut the attributions because of space constraints and told Sauer he’d add original source links to the web version of Taibbi’s story.
Sauer also spoke with Taibbi who admitted he phoned in his story, never setting foot in Minnesota. That tidbit has Ripple in Stillwater editor Karl Bremmer especially exercised. Bremer wants to know just how Taibbi could have come up with his “racially-charged profile of Stillwater-as-Stepford.” Here’s how Taibbi describes Stillwater:
“Moving back to Minnesota, she and Marcus settled in Stillwater, a town of 18,000 near St. Paul, where they raised their five children and took in 23 foster kids. Stillwater is a Midwestern version of a Currier & Ives set piece, complete with cozy homes, antique stores—and no black people. In short, the perfect launching pad for a political career built on Bachmann’s retro-Stepford image. Stillwater’s congressional district is the whitest district in Minnesota (95 percent) and one of the wealthiest in America (with a median income $16,000 above the national average).”
My wife, stepson, and I lived in Stillwater from 1982-86, and still visit fairly regularly. I can say that Taibbi’s description, while basically accurate, wildly misses characterizing Stillwater completely. Bremmer tells Sauer, who actually sought out and talked to sources, “He [Taibbi] did prove my point about clueless journalists making Stillwater out to be another Wasilla full of wingnuts.” Well, sorry to say, but that’s an accurate—if limited—vignette of Stillwater as well. When we lived there, Buster and Leaping Lena were the star wingnut attractions. Small towns everywhere tolerate their wingnuts.
Taibbi didn’t stop at lifting from local blogs. He also helped himself to generous portions of G.R. Anderson Jr.‘s “The Chosen One,” published in 2006 by City Pages. To date, Anderson’s piece remains the definitive Bachmann profile.
City Pages published Anderson’s take on Taibbi and his Rolling Stone article and Anderson is quite exercised his own self, not just because Taibbi used his work without credit but because he’d pitched Rolling Stone‘s Eric Bates on the story and was rejected. Anderson doesn’t consider what Taibbi did plagiarism, but does want an apology. He should get it.
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