I’m making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt Taibbi: I don’t really follow him so I’m not evaluating him personally, just your statement in general.

I have a finite amount of time. I don’t have time to “play the ball” given how many balls are out there. Particularly if the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio source in the past.

I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if you’ve got a track record of not having useful information for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I’m not going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads up about why I think you’re not correct.

But I value my time and eventually it’s just not worth the expenditure.

So no, I’m not going to play the ball: I’ll play the player if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on occasion? Sure. But I just don’t have infinite time so I use heuristics and accept imperfection.

There’s another dimension of this discussion about sphere of awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to align them.