Good news for Matt Taibbi fans: he's apparently got a new gig as the 08 political reporter for Bill Maher's show. Here's a clip from (I think) his first episode. It features a discussion of the surge in which Taibbi comments to Tony Snow that "I wouldn't trust you people to tell me the f*cking time" and Snow's angry retort that Taibbi is "perfectly cynical" and that soldiers in Iraq "have been part of something special.

There are a lot of answers, but one big reason is that he can be an incredibly derisive prick:

David Brooks today was but the latest to unveil this new wisdom, following along with Peter Beinart's fact-free declaration last week that the diastrous war he cheered on is now politically irrelevant (a column that, as intended, predictably caused people like National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru to issue the ultimate TNR/NR Compliment-Cliche: "Peter Beinart has a smart column")

That parenthetical is just dripping with derision, no? It's similar flights of prickishness--though admittedly in different flavors--that make people like Alexander Cockburn or Matt Taibbi fun to read. There's an argument to be made that there's a real shortage of smart, abrasive commentators in the mainstream media.

My interview with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi reignited the old row over whether j-school is necessary. There has been predictable bitterness from j-school partisans about Taibbi's comment that "You can learn the entire thing in like three days" and that "Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors." This comment appeared at the media blog Romenesko:

For 40 years I've heard there was no point in going to journalism school by people who didn't go.

And yet, applications keep rising and editors keep hiring these folks. Mostly because they know you can't "learn it all in like 3 days."

That may be true, but then there's this one:

I actually kinda agree about the whole ‘journalism school being useless’ thing, and I’m about to graduate from a program. I figure that I could have learned most of the stuff I learned in a couple of weeks as a stringer at a newspaper.

Which is why, when I go to grad school, I’m getting a degree in science. Because there are too many reporters out there who know fuck-all about science yet write about it as if they are experts on the topic, and I really, really don’t want to be one of those reporters.

A proposal for detente: Aspiring journalists should not waste their time learning how to take notes at j-school, but neither should they take on mountains of debt to acquire a professional degree and some specialized knowledge. Instead, media organizations should ease young journalists into narrowly focused beats so they can gain an education in a given field. Soon, more journalists would know what the hell they were talking about, and readers would be subjected to much less stenography. Don't think it would work? Then witness, for example, Seymour Hersh's career path.

Update: Here's more from the Chicago Tribune's Julie Deardorff on the impracticality of doctors becoming journalists, given current compensation levels.