Matthew Colin Taibbi (; born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist and podcaster. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books and publisher of Racket News (formerly TK News). He has reported on finance, media, politics and sports.
Taibbi began as a freelance reporter working in Russia. He later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times. In 1997, Taibbi and Mark Ames co-edited the tabloid newspaper The eXile. In 2002, Taibbi returned to the United States and founded the Buffalo-based newspaper The Beast. He left a year later to work as a columnist for the New York Press.
In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone. In 2008, Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for three columns he wrote for Rolling Stone. Taibbi became known for his brazen style, having branded Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid" in a 2009 article about the Wall Street firm's outsized role in the 2008 financial crisis. His work often has drawn comparisons to the gonzo journalism of writer Hunter S. Thompson, who also covered politics for Rolling Stone. In 2019, he launched the podcast Useful Idiots, co-hosted by Katie Halper, before leaving in 2022, where he was succeeded by Aaron Maté. In 2020, he announced that he would no longer release his writing through Rolling Stone and had begun self-publishing his online writing. In recent years, Taibbi's writing has focused on culture war issues and cancel culture. He has criticized mainstream media including its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Between 2022 and 2023, Taibbi released several installments of the Twitter Files.
Taibbi has authored several books, including The Great Derangement (2009); Griftopia (2010); The Divide (2014);Rampell, Ed. "Matt Taibbi." The Progressive, vol. 78, no. 7-8, July–Aug. 2014, pp. 65+. Insane Clown President (2017); I Can't Breathe (2017); and Hate Inc. (2019).
Early life and education Matt Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Taibbi's father, Mike Taibbi, is an NBC television reporter whose biological mother was of mixed Filipino and Native Hawaiian descent, while his father was likely an American serviceman. Mike Taibbi was adopted by an Italian-American couple in New York. According to Taibbi, his surname is a Sicilian name of Lebanese origin; however, he is of neither Sicilian nor Lebanese descent because his father was adopted. He is of Irish descent through his mother.
Taibbi grew up in the Boston suburbs. His parents separated when he was young and he was largely raised by his mother. Because Taibbi was troubled with behavioral and academic problems, his parents sent him to Concord Academy. He first attended New York University but was "unable to deal with being just one of thousands of faces in a city of millions" and transferred after his freshman year to Bard College, where he graduated in 1992. He spent a year abroad studying at Leningrad Polytechnic University, where he finished his credits for graduation from Bard.
Career
Russia After completing his college work midsemester, Taibbi moved to New York City where he spent two months working as a waiter to save money for a plane ticket to Russia. In 1992, missing his college graduation, Taibbi moved to Saint Petersburg. Seven months later, Taibbi moved to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he began selling news articles more regularly. He returned to Saint Petersburg five months later, after being deported by the Uzbek secret police for writing an article for the Associated Press that was critical of President Islam Karimov. At the time of his deportation, Taibbi was the starting left fielder for the Uzbekistan national baseball team. Six months later, Taibbi moved to Moscow to take a job at the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, where he worked as a sports editor for five months.
Taibbi moved back to the U.S. doing part-time landscaping work before suffering a nervous breakdown and moving north, where he had an affair with a married woman. He then moved back to Russia to play pro baseball for two Russian clubs, Spartak, and the Red Army, in 1995. After five months in Russia, Taibbi moved back to the East Coast, where he worked as an investigator at a Boston-based private detective agency. After seven months as a private detective, Taibbi moved to Russia to "write a book about serial murder" and began working for The Moscow Times again, as a news reporter. He returned to the U.S. again after five months to resume his relationship with the divorcée but they broke up and Taibbi returned to Russia to work for The Moscow Times for the third time. He initially planned to return to America in the summer of 1996 to rekindle their relationship, but found himself too busy covering the 1996 Russian presidential election.
Taibbi then moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where he played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association (MBA). Taibbi became known as "The Mongolian Rodman", was paid $100/month to play, and said he also hosted a radio show while there. He later contracted pneumonia and, in early January 1997, returned to Boston for surgery to correct an empyema. Doctors had suspected he was infected with bacterial meningitis, but later determined he was only a carrier of the bacteria and he recovered after a course of antibiotics.
Shortly after his 27th birthday in March 1997, Taibbi returned to Moscow to take on a job as editor of the tabloid Living Here, which had gone defunct at the time. That same year, he left the Living Here and joined Mark Ames to co-edit the English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile, which was written primarily for the city's expatriate community. The eXiles tone and content were highly controversial. For example, a regular column reported on a member of staff at The eXile hiring a Russian prostitute and then writing a long "review" of the woman and the details of the sexual encounter. Its content was considered either brutally honest and gleefully tasteless or juvenile, misogynistic and even cruel.Rolling Stone Magazine, issue 800, November 26, 1998. (see also Hamann's site )
Taibbi wrote in English and Russian. He also contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Trud, Stringer and Kommersant.
The Exile book Taibbi's first book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, co-authored with Ames, was published in 2000. A film based on the book was under development by producers Ted Hope and James Schamus of Good Machine but did not materialize. He later stated that he was addicted to heroin while he did this early writing.
In 2010, journalist James Verini wrote in Vanity Fair that during an interview in a Manhattan restaurant, he told Taibbi that The Exile was "redundant and discursive". Verini wrote that Taibbi became enraged, threw his coffee and a "Fuck you!" in Verini's face, followed him for half a block after he left the restaurant, and said "I still haven't decided what I'm going to do with you!" Taibbi later described the incident as "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years".
In 2017, Taibbi was criticized for excerpts from a chapter written by Ames in the book The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia that described sexual harassment of employees at The eXile. In a Facebook post responding to the controversy, Taibbi apologized for the "cruel and misogynistic language" used in the book, and said the work was conceived as a satire of the "reprehensible" behavior of American expatriates in Russia and that the description of events in the chapter was "fictional and not true". In 2017, the Washington Post published an article by journalist Kathy Lally about Taibbi and Ames' time at the eXile. Lally wrote that the "eXile's distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted [her]" and that "so many of their sins were real". Although the book presents itself as a work of non-fiction, emails obtained by Paste in 2017 include a letter from the book's publisher stating that "This book combines exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting and was categorized as nonfiction because there is no category for a book that is both." Two women portrayed in the book told Paste magazine that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book "[ever] happened" and that it was a "ridiculous passage written by Mark". Taibbi's publisher, Penguin Random House, dropped him after the controversy.
United States
In 2002, he returned to the United States to start the satirical bi-weekly The Beast in Buffalo, New York. He left that publication a year later, commenting: "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 more than two years), Rolling Stone, and New York Sports Express (as editor-at-large).
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. He left the paper in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced out over the article. Taibbi defended the piece as "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes," written to give his readers a break from a long run of his "fulminating political essays". Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze".
In February 2008, Taibbi contributed a three-minute segment to Real Time with Bill Maher in which he interviewed residents of Youngstown, Ohio before the Ohio primary. He was invited as a guest on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and other MSNBC programs. He has also appeared on Democracy Now! and Chapo Trap House, and was a contributor on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Taibbi has appeared on the Thom Hartmann radio and television shows and the Imus in the Morning Show on the Fox Business network.
Taibbi wrote a column, "The Sports Blotter", for the free weekly newspaper, The Boston Phoenix. He covered legal troubles involving professional and amateur athletes.
Rolling Stone In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone. A contributing editor, he wrote feature-length articles on domestic and international affairs. He also wrote a weekly political online column, "The Low Post", for the magazine's website.
Taibbi covered the 2008 United States presidential election in Year of the Rat, a special Rolling Stone diary.
After conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart died in March 2012, Taibbi wrote an obituary in Rolling Stone, entitled "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche". Taibbi also wrote: "Good! Fuck him. I couldn't be happier that he's dead." He wrote that the obituary was "at least half an homage", which gave respect to aspects of Breitbart's style and also alluded to Breitbart's own derisive obituary of Ted Kennedy. In a postscript, Taibbi wrote that some fans of Breitbart were angered by the obituary and responded with "threats and insults".
Financial journalism