Taibbi's reporting on Obama's financial team here; it's essential reading. Fernholz's swing-and-miss rebuttal. Taibbi's response, also essential reading.* From Fernholz:
"Pernicious," forsooth? As Avedon remarks:
[N]ow they're attacking Matt Taibbi for saying what's true. Apparently, even when they agree with your facts, you're a "conspiracy theorist" for stating them in public.
Yep. Taibbi transgressed the unwritten law. So the Prospect is nailing his head to the floor.
NOTE * As much for the rhetorical techniques that Fernholz uses as anything else. A sample, from Taibbi's rebuttal:
So in other words while I [Taibbi] reported that Kornbluh had been a key voice in the campaign only to lose influence and ultimately get shipped off to the OECD, the truth [Fernholz] is that she was a key voice in the campaign who lost her influence and ultimately got shipped off to the OECD.
Nice work.
NOTE To be fair to Fernholz, maybe the TAPPED team doesn't know how to copy edit. They certainly don't know how to fact-check.
UPDATE Digby's kind to Fernholz, but she's on the mark with Taibbi:
He has a way of making people understand complicated issues, which used to be something to which journalism aspired. And because he is unafraid to take a position, he doesn't observe journalistic conventions which require ordinary people to read between the lines and translate the weird Village
patois in order to get some sense of the underlying truth.
Yeah, I know, the primariez. Well, Taibbi's in the Class of 2009, I guess. Many will never do so well.
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Copy editing is like polishing buggy whips.
Gawker (http://gawker.com/5423324/what-the-new-y...) covers buy-outs at the New York Times, ending with "[Special shout out to the many departing members of the NYT copy desk. Copy editors will soon be a luxury remembered wistfully.]"
From the first two comments:
"I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how weird it now is that nearly every other thing I read online contains major typos, mis-spellings, bad grammar, poor facts, etc. About how with the internet at hand and with print drying up and cutting back at its copy/research departments, the new norm is dumbed down."
"Like myself, many old-school copy editors, fact-checkers and proofers still care about every character, every word and every piece of punctuation, and we would sooner go without food than leave behind a tenuous sentence at the end of the day. But I have yet to come across anyone under 40 who has this training or cares about preserving this legacy."
I always had confidence that the world would always need copy editors and proofreaders; I was wrong. I was good at something that is now regarded as useless.
(That said, this was just a typo. I'm surprised Fernholz didn't use spell-check.)
Deleted double post.
Oops.
Computers made a difference, too.
I remember a study from the nineties that showed proofreaders were more accurate reading paper versus a computer screen. A local (NYC) girl in junior high school won a Westinghouse award for it.