Matt Taibbi rips Fareed Zakaria

I have always felt a strong, inexplicable pull towards liking and agreeing with Fareed Zakaria, without knowing why.

I remember telling a friend of mine about a year ago that I really like his articles, but that I wished sometimes he would just drop the proper, status quo act and just really tell it like it is for once.

Thanks to the greatest political blogger in the world, Matt Taibbi, I no longer feel that strange desire to nod my head at everything Zakaria says or writes. In his latest post, Taibbi rips Zakaria’s Newsweek piece defending capitalism into a million tiny pieces, and unlike the Fry book, it is chocked-full of unalderated truth:

“Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull and the outrageous commonplace, rendering horrifying absolutes ambiguous and full of gray areas.“

(In his original piece, he misspelled ambiguous. But it’s cool because I misspell things like that all the time.)

Suddenly it all makes sense. I found myself feeling the need to agree with Fareed Zakaria because he represents common sense; ie conventional wisdom. The problem with conventional wisdom is that it is right 99.9 percent of the time, but when it’s wrong, the consequences are disastrous. Example: the western mainstream media’s pitiful, even to this day, explanations for the roots and causes of Islamic terrorism.

I have expressed my displeasure with the general mediocrity in Newsweek’s reporting before, but seeing Zakaria in this new light puts the very integrity of the publication into question as far as I’m concerned.

Ok, Jonathan Alter is not and never has embodied anything close to the cavalier journalistic spirit of E.R Murrow, but I always held a certain degree of respect for Newsweek until very recently. Perhaps it has something to do with my upbringing. Newsweek was the magazine of record in my house growing up, so it’s afforded a special status in my subconscious, but now I find it hard to believe that I was blinded to their mainstream B.S. for so long.

There are many many drawbacks to the development of new media and the gradual decay and death of traditional newspapers and magazines. Yes, it’s cool that Twitter is available to the Iranians, but it’s also shown how unreliable it is by crashing every 8 hours.

Yes, blogs have promoted decentralization and democratization as far as how people get and perceive their news, but there’s also no fact-checker working behind the scenes, nobody to call an anonymous blogger out when they publish grade-A, irresponsible nonsense. (You shut up.  Just shut up. We’ll discuss my nonsense another day.)

Yes, there are a lot of problems with the current trends in media. But my heart swells with joy when I envision a day when nobody has to pretend to like a journalist just because he represents conventional wisdom.