Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi
Born	Matthew C. Taibbi March 2, 1970 (1970-03-02) (age 41)
Occupation	Journalist, political writer, columnist
Notable relatives	Mike Taibbi (father)
Nationality	American

Matthew C. "Matt" Taibbi (born March 2, 1970) is an American author and polemical journalist reporting on politics, media, finance, and sports for Rolling Stone and Men's Journal.^[1] Previously he edited and wrote for The eXile, the New York Press, and The Beast.

Early years

Taibbi grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburbs. He attended Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, and Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, then spent a year abroad at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University. His father is Mike Taibbi, an NBC television reporter.

Career

In 1992 Taibbi arrived in Uzbekistan, but articles critical of the country's president, Islam Karimov, made it prudent for him to leave after six months^{[citation needed]}. Afterwards Taibbi worked for The Moscow Times as a sports editor^{[citation needed]}, and in Mongolia he worked as a professional basketball player^{[citation needed]} and as a correspondent for Montsame^{[citation needed]}, the Mongolian National News Agency.

Taibbi was among the first Americans to play Russian professional baseball^{[citation needed]}, playing center field for Spartak Moscow^{[citation needed]}. While playing professional basketball in Ulan Bator, Mongolia^{[citation needed]}, Taibbi contracted pneumonia and returned to Boston for treatment and recuperation with his family. Post recovery he returned to Russia where he edited the expat paper Living Here^{[citation needed]}, before joining Mark Ames in 1997 to co-edit the controversial English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile. Of Exile, Taibbi said, "We were out of the reach of American libel law, and we had a situation where we weren’t really accountable to our advertisers. We had total freedom."^[2] In the U.S. media, Playboy magazine published pieces on Russia both by Taibbi and by Taibbi and Ames together during this time.

In 2002, he returned to the U.S. to start the satirical bi-weekly The Beast in Buffalo, New York, which he eventually left declaring that "Running a business and writing is too much." Taibbi continued as a freelancer for The Nation, Playboy, New York Press (where he wrote a regular political column for over two years), Rolling Stone, and New York Sports Express (as Editor at Large). Taibbi said being a journalist was a "career failure. I wanted to be a novelist," he announced at an NYU lecture.

Taibbi left the New York Press in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced to quit over issues raised by Taibbi's column "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope."^[3][4][5] "I have since learned that there would not have been an opportunity for me to stay anyway," Taibbi later wrote.^[6]

Taibbi became a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone, penning feature-length articles on domestic and international affairs, along with a weekly political online column titled "The Low Post" for the magazine's web site. Taibbi writes for the print edition of Rolling Stone, and contributes to their website in his current blog, "Taibblog." A later online column titled "Year of the Rat" was meant to document the 2008 election season, but it ended after only a few postings.^[7] His July 2009 Rolling Stone article "The Great American Bubble Machine" described Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."^[1][8]

Taibbi covered the 2008 presidential campaign for Real Time with Bill Maher,^[9] and he has made several guest appearances on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show^[10] to discuss the 2009 economic crisis. He also appears on the progressive Democracy Now! show^[11] and serves as a contributor on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.^[12]

Sports journalism

Taibbi also writes a column called "The Sports Blotter" for the free weekly newspaper the Boston Phoenix. The column provides a rundown of the arrests, civil suits, and criminal trials involving professional athletes.

Awards

In 2008, Taibbi was awarded the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary" for his Rolling Stone columns.^[13]

Controversy and confrontation

In March 2001, as editor of the magazine The eXile, Matt Taibbi burst into the office of New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines and threw a cream pie into his face, after Taibbi's magazine had awarded Wines the title of "worst journalist" in Russia.^[14]

In March 2005 Taibbi's satirical essay, "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope", published in the New York Press was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. The editor who approved the column lost his job.^[15][16] Taibbi defended the piece as an "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes" written to give his readers a break from a long run of "fulminating political essays" of his. Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze."^[17]

Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, and accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini's volunteered opinion that Taibbi's book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was "redundant and discursive."^[18] Taibbi later said the incident was "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years."^[19]

Bibliography

• The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia (ISBN 0-8021-3652-4). Co-authored with Mark Ames, and published in 2000 with a foreword by Edward Limonov. A movie based on the book is under development by producers Ted Hope and James Schamus of Good Machine.^[20]

• Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats, (ISBN 1-56584-891-8). A campaign diary from the 2004 US presidential election, published by New Press in 2005.

• Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, (ISBN 0-8021-7041-2). Published by Grove Press, Black Cat in 2007.

• The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, (ISBN 0-385-52034-4). Published by Spiegel & Grau in 2008.

• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, (ISBN 0-385-52995-3). Published by Spiegel & Grau in 2010.

• Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season, (ISBN 978-0307345714). Published by Three Rivers Press (August 22, 2006).

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Salmon, Felix (DEC/JAN, 2011). "Giant Sucking Sound". Book Forum. http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/1704/6618. 
2. ^ Leaya Lee. "Lecture: Matt Taibbi". Bullpen. http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/bullpen/matt_taibbi/lecture/. 
3. ^ [1] Original NYPress Article
4. ^ Media: Jeff Koyen's Exit Interview
5. ^ [2]^{[dead link]}
6. ^ Taibbi, Matt (2005-08-24). "New York Press - MATT TAIBBI - End of the Road". Nypress.com. http://www.nypress.com/18/33/news&columns/taibbi.cfm. Retrieved 2011-03-31. 
7. ^ Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone^{[dead link]}
8. ^ Taibbi, Matt (July 13, 2009). "The Great American Bubble Machine". Rolling Stone (1082-1083). http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine. 
9. ^ "Real Time: Matt Taibbi follows the Clinton campaign in Youngstown, Ohio"
10. ^ "The Rachel Maddow Show Guest List: Week of March 30, 2009". http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28314808/. Retrieved 2009-04-01. 
11. ^ ""Worst Congress Ever: Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on How Our National Legislature Has Become a "Stable of Thieves and Perverts""". 2006-10-27. http://www.democracynow.org/2006/10/27/worst_congress_ever_rolling_stones_matt. 
12. ^ Stelter, Brian (20 June 2011). "At New Network, Olbermann Sets Sights on MSNBC". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/business/media/20pundit.html. Retrieved 23 June 2011. 
13. ^ "Magazine Publishers of America, NMA Winners". Magazine.org. 2010-04-22. http://www.magazine.org/ASME/MAGAZINE_AWARDS/NMA_WINNERS/index.aspx. Retrieved 2011-03-31. 
14. ^ "The End of the Exile Era", 2008-06-24, The St. Petersburg Times. Retrieved 2011-07-20.
15. ^ "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope", Taibbi column, March 9, 2005, New York Press. Retrieved Mar 29, 2010.
16. ^ "New York Press Editor Quits Over Article". Nytimes.com. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/arts/08arts.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position=&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2011-03-31. 
17. ^ "Keep Pope Alive", March 16, 2005, New York Press. Retrieved Mar 29, 2010.
18. ^ Verini, James (2010-02-23). "Lost Exile | Culture". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/exile-201002?printable=true&currentPage=1. Retrieved 2011-03-31. 
19. ^ "The Father of the Squid | The New York Observer". Observer.com. 2010-10-19. http://www.observer.com/2010/wall-street/father-squid?page=1. Retrieved 2011-03-31. 
20. ^ "Search at". Hollywood.com. http://www.hollywood.com/movies/detail/id/3463251. Retrieved 2011-03-31. 

External links

• Matt Taibbi's blog at Rolling Stone magazine
• Matt Taibbi on The Young Turks show
• Matt Taibbi's Blog at The Smirking Chimp
• Matt Taibbi's (now defunct) blog at True/Slant
• Matt Taibbi at the Internet Movie Database

Selected works

• Archive of Rolling Stone "The Low Post" articles
• Archive of Taibbi's articles in The Nation
• Archive of Taibbi's AlterNet articles
• "Wall Street's Naked Swindle"
• "The Truth About the Tea Party"
• "The Great American Bubble Machine: How Goldman-Sachs Blew up the Economy"

Interviews

• "Looting Main Street" video by Democracy Now!
• 23 April 2011, 25 April 2010, 9 July 2009, 14 April 2005 interviews on Behind the News with Doug Henwood

Biographical works

• Lloyd Grove column featuring denouncements, The New York Daily News
• Background: Matt Taibbi in Bullpen, a publication of the New York University school of journalism
• "Fed Time for Gonzo at Rolling Stone: Political Reporter Matt Taibbi Surrounds Capitol Hill With Barbed Ire", The Washington Post
• "Lost Exile: The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper. ", Vanity Fair

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Name	Taibbi, Matt
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Date of birth	1970
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