Here's why news consumers should follow Matt Taibbi

If you're a fringe follower or constant critic of the journalism business, and you hear "politics writer for Rolling Stone magazine," you probably think of someone who's spent his career leaning left and making that clear in his work.

But Matt Taibbi is one of the most honest newsmen out there, and he is a must-follow if you are in need of a refresher on the importance of fair and accurate reporting.

Even if you're not, you should follow him. I read his book "Hate Inc." last year, and have listened to many of his talks/interviews/podcast appearances over the last couple of years.

You haven't needed to be in the business for long to have covered local angles of the COVID crisis, as well as America's civil reckoning. For two years, these have been two highly-visible stories plenty ripe for some reporters to stray from objectivity toward the familiar comfort of our long-held personal beliefs.

I'm not here to get into the specifics of these stories or even the coverage of them, but I wanted to share some notes I took a while back after listening to Taibbi talk shop on Joe Rogan's podcast in December.?

"Once upon a time, I think the idea within the news business was pretty simple," Taibbi started. "Reporters were raised, basically ... we'll get all the facts. We'll work really hard on getting it right. We'll give it to you. And then you do what you want with it. It's not our job to tell you what decisions to make. It's just our job to get it correct, and then that's the news. After that, it's up to you to make your own political decisons. That's why political affiliations didn't necessarily mean so much back in the day. It was always true that basically all reporters were Democrats, but it didn't show so much in the news media once upon a time because we had a professional ethos that said, 'we're not supposed to care.'"

That's one thing I've had to tell a few friends over the years who trash what I do for a living, that the trick for journalists isn't to live a life free of conviction or opinion. No, the trick is to check those beliefs at the door every morning and keep them out of our work.

"We go into cover whatever," he continued. "We're just gonna collect all the facts, get all the quotes, put it out there, make sure everything's been checked, and then it's your deal.?

"Now, there's this new ethos ... that that's not good enough. (Reporters now think they) have to compensate for inequities in the system by basically trying to impact how people behave through coverage ... They're trying to get you to make political decisions by how they cover things."

I can't say you don't see this on the local level, but it's far more prevalent in national/cable news. We're seeing a lot of this in recent years in coverage of issues related to woke-ism. Woke-ism by itself is good. If you're woke, it just means you are aware that social injustices, particularly racial, exist in our culture. But like any social movement, woke-ism can sometimes go too far, and that's why we have cancel culture.?

Not being woke, for example, might keep you from getting certain social invitations -- say, if you're a baseball player who chooses not to wear a rainbow patch on your game uniform during Pride Month -- but you very well might have a reason you believe deeply in that keeps you from wearing such a patch. Our reporting should be objective, not influential, and is not supposed to be informed in any way by how we feel about an issue, but it often is. Woke-ism, just like many other subjects reporters cover, carries multiple complexities and/or interpretations and requires balance in coverage, just as anything else does.

"I saw this early on as a campaign reporter (around) 2004-08," Taibbi said. "I would sit on the bus with the reporters, and they would be discussing which candidates they were going to describe as fringe, which ones they were going to describe as electable, which ones would be serious, because they enjoyed having the power of deciding for people who got to be taken seriously and who didn't. I think that urge to mold how people act is just ingrained in the business and it's so off-putting."

Taibbi then harkened back to the days when the consistent behavior among journalists seemed a little more noble than it might be today.

"The whole idea of being a journalist was to not think like other people," he said. "You were your own person, you thought for yourself, you made your own decisions about things ... The whole point of the job was to be like that, because it required somebody who had the ability to look at every situation completely objectively and not be affected by peer pressure. That was a prerequisite for being able to do this job well. The idea that we're all going to parrot each other's thinking about things is totally alien to what this job is supposed to be about. And now all of a sudden it's become the opposite. It's become if you even try to opt out of doing that, you're suspect, you're going to be drummed out of the business. It's just nuts."

"Hate Inc." covers the convergence of media, politics and culture in the age of Trump. It was published in 2019, but I didn't read it until he released an updated edition following the 2020 election. Taibbi remains critical of all sides and characters who play a role in the escalating war on civility in America. By that I mean he doesn't just skewer politicians on both sides of the aisle; he's just as comfortable challenging the integrity of the very industry that feeds him.?

That type of honesty is why I think you should follow him as a model to emulate if you're a newsperson, or just to get accurate reporting if you follow current events. I've recently started reading his "Griftopia," his 2010 look at the 2008 financial collapse. In it he does a more-than-thorough job of exposing American corruption at its highest institutional levels, which led to that recession.

Who would you recommend as an important follow??