I was unaware of Levine before posting the link, which I think is a fair enough story, rather than a "hatchet job", btw.

Having looked now, though, I'd say "interesting" rather than "ridiculous." See, for example "Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?" [1] - which gloriously headlined article seems to have broken the story of the Koch brothers' involvement in the Tea Party and other astroturf campaigns, back in 2009.

Also worth a look is the claimed list of other post-eXile scoops at exiledonline [2]

Same for The Exile itself - "tabloid" seems a little mild.

- Vanity Fair on The Exile [3]:

> In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before. Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, The Exile’s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the “frat boy” Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate The Exile’s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a Consumer Reports exposé—“There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked,” he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.

[...]

> But far more dangerous in Putin’s Russia was The Exile’s serious journalism. By the time it was shuttered, the paper had published damning views of Russian life through three administrations, two wars, and a stock-market crash, ever since the freezing February night in 1997 when, penniless and infuriatingly sober, Ames had put out the first issue in a torrent of outrage at the sharpies and frauds who insisted that post-Communist Russia was a new democratic paradise, at the liars in the Kremlin, the dreamers in Washington, the academic careerists, Wall Street, the World Bank, the idiots in the press who’d never hired him—at pretty much everyone save Ames himself. Never mind that he and Taibbi would prove the hardest-partying Moscow media celebrities of their time, never mind that they wouldn’t just expose the place’s hedonism but come to embody it—Ames was pissed off. He wasn’t George Plimpton chasing Hemingway’s Sad Young Men as part of some romantic lost generation. He was living in the unromantic rubble of a lost empire.

> “Everything was about free markets and capitalism and democracy, and it was all leading us to some great new future, but all you had to do was look around in the streets and see there was something fucking wrong with it,” Ames says. “We were in the middle of total devastation, one of the worst, most horrible fucking tragedies of modern times.”

> Ames was from the start vindictive, and carping, and paranoid, and, in the opinion of Exile devotees, a group that includes many of its victims, he also happened to be right.

> “They were incredibly gutsy,” former Moscow-bureau chief of The Economist Edward Lucas says. Ames once devoted a cover story to deriding Lucas’s reporting, and The Exile panned his book, but nonetheless Lucas read the paper regularly. “There was kind of a suspension of disbelief in the 1990s—it may be corrupt, but it will work. The Exile spotted very perceptively that the most optimistic Western interpretation was wrong.”

> “They were very direct and visceral and often very scurrilous, but they caught a side of Moscow that no one else did,” Owen Matthews, currently Moscow-bureau chief for Newsweek, says. “They didn’t feel the need to hedge around with reportorial politesse,” and Ames is “a great stylist. I don’t compare him to Céline lightly. He has that quality of brutal honesty.” This from a man whom Ames repeatedly savaged in print, once describing his teeth as leaning “randomly like Celtic temple ruins.” Still, he’s an admirer. “I haven’t seen a newspaper that’s so breathtakingly dark and cynical and brilliant,” Matthews says. “They had something going that really couldn’t be repeated anywhere. It would be out of business in three seconds if they tried to publish it in the U.S.”

> “They took me on for using journalistic clichés, and at the end of the day I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right,’” says Colin McMahon, a former Moscow-bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, adding, “I read it because it was good for story ideas, frankly. These guys were deeper into a subculture of Moscow than I could ever have allowed myself to be. I’d see something in The Exile and say, ‘How can I get this into a story without mainlining cocaine?’”

[1] http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-m...

[2] http://exiledonline.com/vanity-fair-profiles-the-exile/

[3] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/exile-201...