His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly.
I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.
Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
You are right though that there is a certain level of trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.
I understand that you feel he is getting rich but do you have knowledge of his personal finances to make this assertion? Or even some sort of a basis for this intuition you can point people towards? Please enlighten me with some napkin math.
Meanwhile, the slacks and emails he posted are certainly real.
> He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.
As opposed to journalists who don't need eyeballs to justify their existence?
