Individual reporters making money with a blog (instead of employment with a news outlet) certainly have worse fact checking. The best news sources in the world have huge fact checking teams that help to verify everything. This small mistakes that Tabbi made would be much less likely to slip if he were part of a major news org.
I'm old enough to remember when any journalist who didn't check their facts wasn't worth reading for anything beyond entertainment value. P.J. O'Rouke would need someone to do the work for him. Sy Hersh, not so much.
I look at Taibbi's work and haven't found uncorrected error. NYT? WaPo? Well it's not fair, there are orders of magnitude more opportunities for them to mess it up but yep, they sure have, often, on stories Taibbi didn't.
