Matthew C. "Matt" Taibbi (born March, 1970) is an American journalist. He currently works at Rolling Stone where he authors a column called "Road Rage" for the print version, and a weekly online column called "The Low Post". He is best known for his coverage of the 2004 US presidential election, and for his former editorial positions at newspapers the eXile, the New York Press, and the Beast. In 2008 Taibbi was a regular contributor to Real Time with Bill Maher. In March 2009 he joined True/Slant as a blogger. In July 2009 he attracted attention for his Rolling Stone article on investment bank Goldman Sachs, whom he accuses of helping engineer "every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."
Taibbi spent his childhood in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Concord Academy 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.
In 1992 Taibbi moved to Uzbekistan, but was forced to leave six months later after writing articles critical of the country's president, Islom Karimov. Afterwards, Taibbi worked for The Moscow Times as a sports editor, before moving on to work in Russia and Mongolia as a professional athlete and as a correspondent for Montsame, the Mongolian National News Agency.
Taibbi then took a break from journalism and turned to professional sports. He was one of the first Americans to play Russian pro baseball, playing center field for Spartak Moscow. While playing professional basketball in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, Taibbi contracted a serious case of pneumonia and returned to Boston for treatment. After recovering with his family, he returned to Russia and became editor of the expat paper Living Here. He then joined Mark Ames in 1997 to co-edit the controversial English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile. Taibbi said about that experience, "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."
In 2002, he returned to the U.S. to start the satirical bi-weekly The Beast in Buffalo, New York. He eventually left The Beast, declaring that "Running a business and writing is too much." Taibbi continued as a freelancer, writing for The Nation, Playboy, New York Press (where he wrote a regular political column for over two years), Rolling Stone, New York Sports Express (where he was Editor at Large), but with reservations. "For me, it’s a career failure. I wanted to be a novelist," he announced at an NYU lecture. In 2004, while Taibbi followed the democratic campaign of the 2004 US presidential election, he wore a gorilla suit in front of campaign staffers and took LSD at a major debate.
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." Media: Jeff Koyen's Exit Interview "I have since learned that there would not have been an opportunity for me to stay anyway," Taibbi later wrote. New York Press - MATT TAIBBI - End of the Road
Taibbi went on to serve as a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone, penning feature-length articles on both domestic and international affairs and a weekly political column titled "The Low Post" for the magazine's Web site. Taibbi continues to write for the print edition of Rolling Stone, but has stopped contributing to his online column. 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.
Taibbi served as a special correspondent for Real Time with Bill Maher offering political coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, and he has made several guest appearances on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the 2009 economic crisis.
In 2009 in Rolling Stone he 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."
Sports journalism
Taibbi also writes a column called the "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.
In March 2005, Taibbi wrote a column for New York Press, entitled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope". The column was denounced by Senator Hillary Clinton, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, and Abe Foxman, among others, including Congressman Anthony Weiner who suggested that New Yorkers throw copies of that issue of the magazine in the trash. The editor who approved the column was suspended, and resigned. In a subsequent column entitled "Keep Pope Alive", Taibbi defended the controversial piece as "an off-the-cuff burlesque of Truly Tasteless Jokes," which he said was designed to give readers a break from a long run of "fulminating political essays" in his column space. In a written response, Taibbi said " 'The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope' " had almost nothing to do with the pope or Catholics whatsoever, and certainly wasn't hate speech. If there was hate in the piece, it was not for the pope but for the agonizing marathon of mechanized media grief and adulation we so inevitably go through after the passing of each and every hallowed leader or celebrity." In the same response he expressed surprise at the strong response for a piece that he had "written in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze."
In a 2010 Vanity Fair article chronicling the demise of the eXile, journalist James Verini alleges that Taibbi cursed at him and threw a coffee in his face after being told The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia was "redundant and discursive." Verini maintains that the incident took place in a crowded Manhattan restaurant during lunchtime and that after storming out Taibbi further accosted him on the street.
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. [1]
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.
Works
Wall Street's Naked Swindle
[2]
Archive of articles by Taibbi in The Nation
Archive of Taibbi's AlterNet articles
Archive of Rolling Stone "The Low Post" articles
The Big Takeover, which describes how Wall Street giants have consolidated their power as a result of financial crisis and bailout
The Great American Bubble Machine: How Goldman-Sachs blew up the economy
Mad Dog Palin
Matt Taibbi's current blog
"Looting Main Street" - Taibbi on How the Nation’s Biggest Banks Are Ripping Off American Cities - video by Democracy Now!
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
