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Matt Taibbi

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Matt Taibbi (b. 1970) is an American journalist. He is best known for his recent coverage of the 2004 US presidential election, and for his former editorial positions at newspapers the eXile and the Beast.

File:Matt taibbi promo.jpg
A Photograph of Matt Taibbi

Biography

Taibbi spent his childhood in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Bard College, spending his senior year abroad at Leningrad State 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 critically about the country's president. Afterwards, Taibbi worked for The Moscow Times as a sports editor, before moving on to work as a professional athlete in Russia and Mongolia, and as a correspondent for Montsame, the Mongolian National News Agency. After a serious bout of pneumonia and another stint with the The Moscow Times, he 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."([1]).

In 2002, he returned to the U.S. to start the satirical bi-weekly The Beast in Buffalo, New York. Ultimately, however, he left the paper, which continued without him: "Running a business and writing is too much," Taibbi later declared. He continued as a freelancer, writing for The Nation, Playboy, New York Press (where he wrote a regular political column for over 2 years), Rolling Stone, and other publications, but with reservations. "For me, it’s a career failure. I wanted to be a novelist," he announced at an NYU lecture.

In March 2005, Taibbi wrote a column for NY 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, and Matt Drudge, among others. 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. Taibbi claimed his parody had been a protest against "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."

Taibbi left the NY Press in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced to quit over issues raised by Taibbi's article. (See "Editor Out Over Pope Parody") [2][3]. "I have since learned that there would not have been an opportunity for me to stay anyway," Taibbi later wrote.[4] Since his departure, he has since been writing features for Rolling Stone about the American political scene, as well as a sports column for the Boston Phoenix.

Bibliography

  • The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia (ISBN 0802136524). 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[5].
  • Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats, (ISBN 1565848918). A campaign diary from the 2004 US presidential election, published by New Press in 2005.

See also

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