I think this is a really nice point from Justin Fox:
The same goes for Matt Taibbi and his already legendary Goldman Sachs rant. If all financial journalists shared Taibbi’s disregard for fairness and his juvenile glee in name-calling, financial journalism would be unbearable. But since most financial journalists try so hard to be fair that they often miss the truth, and write with such sobriety as to be unreadable, Taibbi offers a welcome change of pace and point of view.
This country has spent 50 years in the grips of a pretty narrow consensus on what journalism is supposed to look like. That’s unraveling. And while a lot of things about the future of this business worry me, the increasing diversity of journalistic methods and standards isn’t one of them.
I think that’s right on. The nature of the 20th Century market for news happened to incentivize a certain kind of staid inoffensiveness. This style of covering things has some virtues, but other styles have virtues too. Because such an overwhelming preponderance of the profession was squeezed, for basically economic reasons, into that style a habit developed of labeling the virtues of that style the virtues of journalism. But they’re not. There’s a lot that’s nerve-wracking about the current moment in media, but the stylistic diversity and openness to new ways of doing things should be viewed as exciting.