Matthew Colin Taibbi[3] (/taɪˈiːbi/; born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, former co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast, and publisher of the Racket News (formerly TK News) on Substack.
Taibbi began as a freelance reporter working in the former Soviet Union. 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.[4][5]
Matt Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey.[2] 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.[16] Mike Taibbi was adopted by an Italian-American couple in New York.[17] 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.[16][18][19] He has also claimed Irish descent through his mother.[20]
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.[14] 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.[21][14] He spent a year abroad studying at Leningrad Polytechnic University, where he finished his credits for graduation from Bard.[22][2]
Career
Early career
In the early 1990s, Taibbi moved from Saint Petersburg, Russia to Tashkent, Uzbekistan,[1] where he began selling news articles more regularly. He was deported in 1992 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.[23][4]
Taibbi moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for a time in the 1990s, where he played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association (MBA).[24][2][1] Taibbi became known as "The Mongolian Rodman", was paid $100/month to play,[24] and said he also hosted a radio show while there.[25][26] He later contracted pneumonia and returned to Boston for surgery.[1][27]
Taibbi also worked for a short time as an investigator at a Boston-based private detective agency.[5]
Russia
Taibbi first moved to Russia in 1992.[28] He lived and worked in Russia and the former USSR for more than six years. In 1997, he left the tabloid Living Here and joined Mark Ames to co-edit the English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile,[2][1] which was written primarily for the city's expatriate community. The eXile's 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.[29][30][31]
Taibbi wrote in English and Russian.[32] Apart from The eXile, Taibbi was also employed by the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times,[14] where he worked as a sports editor for five months.[33] He also contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Trud, Stringer, and Kommersant.[34][32]
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!"[6][37] Taibbi later described the incident as "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years".[38][14]
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.[39] 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".[40][41] Although the book presents itself as a work of non-fiction,[42] 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."[43] 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".[43] Taibbi's publisher, Penguin Random House, dropped him after the controversy.[14]
United States
In 2002, he returned to the United States to start the satirical bi-weekly The Beast in Buffalo, New York.[1] He left that publication a year later,[5] commenting: "Running a business and writing is too much." Taibbi continued as a freelancer for The Nation,[1]Playboy, New York Press (where he wrote a regular political column for more than two years),[1]Rolling Stone,[1] 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",[44] 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.[45] 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".[46]
Taibbi wrote a column, "The Sports Blotter", for the free weekly newspaper, The Boston Phoenix.[26] He covered legal troubles involving professional and amateur athletes.[52]
Rolling Stone
In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone.[5] 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.[53]
After conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart died in March 2012, Taibbi wrote an obituary in Rolling Stone, entitled "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche".[55][56] 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".[55]
Financial journalism
In his reporting in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent Great Recession, Taibbi 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".[7][57] In financial and political media the expression "Vampire Squids" has come to represent the perception of the financial and investment sector as entities that "sabotage production" and "sink the economy as they suck the life out of it in the form of rent."[58][7][59][60] Tackling the assistance to banks given in foreclosure courts, Taibbi traveled to Jacksonville, Florida to observe the "rocket docket". He was brought in to observe a hearing with attorney April Charney.[61] He concluded that it processed foreclosures without regard to the legality of the financial instruments being ruled upon, and sped up the process to enable quick resale of the properties, while obscuring the fraudulent and predatory nature of the loans.[62]
In February 2014, Taibbi left Rolling Stone and joined First Look Media to head a financial and political corruption-focused publication, Racket.[63] However, after management disputes with First Look's leadership delayed its launch and led to its cancellation, Taibbi returned to Rolling Stone the following October.[64][65]
In March 2021, Taibbi announced that Useful Idiots would no longer be released by Rolling Stone and would be moving to Substack.[75] With a few changes in program support staff, it is published by Substack as both audio and video that features both a free subscription and a paid subscription.
In January 2022, he announced a sabbatical leave to write a book, and that in his absence Aaron Maté would fill in for him.[76]
Self-publishing
In 2018, Taibbi began publishing a novel, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, as a serialized subscription via email and a website with an anonymous partner.[77] The novel is fictional with true-crime elements.[77]
In April 2020, Taibbi announced he would no longer publish his online writing through Rolling Stone, and henceforth, would publish his online writing independently through the e-mail newsletter service Substack. He stated that he would continue to contribute print features for Rolling Stone and maintain the Useful Idiots podcast with Katie Halper. (In April 2021, Useful Idiots, under its same name, but with some support staff changes, also would move to publication by Substack.) Taibbi stated that his decision to move his writing to a self-published newsletter service was made independently and that he was not asked to leave Rolling Stone.[78][79] Taibbi branded his new Substack newsletter TK news, after a term used in manuscript preparation for publication and journalism, TK, that stands for "to come", indicating that more will follow.[80] After a period of publication with free subscriptions only, Taibbi introduced an additional, paid subscription featuring content that will not be provided as part of the free subscriptions. As of October 2021, TK News had more than 30,000 paying subscribers.[14] On January 24, 2023, the name was changed from TK News to Racket News.
Racket News
Racket News is a newsletter, blog, podcast, and book collection made available largely for free and the rest by subscription at www.racket.news.[81]Racket News is published at the Substack online platform.[non-primary source needed] It is among a growing number of worker-owned journalism outlets including, 404 Media, Defector Media, and Hell Gate NYC.[82]
In addition to Matt Taibbi, contributors include Jane Burn, Ford Fischer, Walter Kirn, Eric Salzman. Other contributors include Emily Bivens, Andrew Lowenthal, Jared Moore, cartoonist Daniel Medina, and Matt Orfalea.[81]
On August 12, 2022, the podcast America This Week was added to TK news. It is a weekly national news wrap-up with Taibbi and Walter Kirn, novelist and literary critic, that is released on Fridays. The duo also discuss a short story at the end of each episode.[83] A transcript of each episode is also published weekly and the podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, in addition to Racket News on Substack.[84]
Taibbi is one of the most popular writers on Substack and earns much more from the platform than he did writing for Rolling Stone.[85]
On December 2, 2022, Taibbi began tweeting about and screenshotting emails that executives of Twitter sent each other concerning content moderation in 2020. The emails were provided to Taibbi[disputed (for: emails were provided) – discuss] by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and documented parts of the discussions among Twitter's communication team about how Twitter should handle a New York Postarticle about a laptop computer that had been owned by Hunter Biden.[86][87][88][89] The documents, dubbed the "Twitter Files" and retweeted by CEO Elon Musk, were selected from "thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter".[86] Taibbi's report was in the form of a Twitter thread with screen shots of email exchanges between Twitter executives. Taibbi noted, "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions" that he did not specify.[90][91]
Taibbi's presentation largely confirmed what was already known and did not contain any significant new revelations.[92][93] Jeffrey Blehar, writing for National Review, said that Taibbi's reporting "contained few, if any, explosive revelations for people who have been tuned in to the debacle surrounding Twitter's suppression of the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop".[94] Taibbi's thread included emails from Ro Khanna to former Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, in which Khanna expressed concern about Twitter's decision to limit the circulation of the New York Post article about Hunter Biden. Khanna wrote that Twitter's actions violated "1st Amendment principles".[95]
The third installment, released on December 9, 2022, by Taibbi, highlighted events within Twitter leading to Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter.[96][better source needed] The sixth installment, released on December 16, 2022, by Taibbi, described how the FBI contacted Twitter to suggest that action be taken against several accounts for allegedly spreading election disinformation.[97][98][better source needed] Taibbi's ninth installment, released on December 24, 2022, relates to the CIA and FBI's alleged involvement in Twitter content moderation.[99][better source needed] The fifteenth installment, released on January 27, 2023, by Taibbi, reports on the Hamilton 68 Dashboard maintained by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.[100][better source needed] The sixteenth installment, released on February 18, 2023, by Taibbi, reports on messages to Twitter by Maine senator Angus King and U.S. State Department security engineer Mark Lenzi expressing concern regarding Twitter accounts they deemed suspicious.[101][non-primary source needed] The seventeenth installment, released on March 2, 2023, by Taibbi, reports on the Global Engagement Center, which was established by the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.[102][non-primary source needed] The nineteenth installment of the Twitter Files, "The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of "True Stories" raises questions about the government and social media censorship.[103]
On March 9, 2023, Taibbi testified, with Michael Shellenberger, before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in a hearing on the Twitter Files.[104][105] Several Democrats at the hearing criticized both Taibbi and Shellenberger, including Stacey Plaskett, who referred to both as "so-called journalists."[106]
Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC interviewed Taibbi on April 6, 2023, presenting several errors in the Twitter Files reporting. Taibbi asserted that these errors were trivial. The next day, Taibbi announced he was leaving Twitter within days in response to Twitter banning links to Substack after it announced its new feature Notes, which has been characterized as a competitor to Twitter. Elon Musk unfollowed Taibbi later that day.[107][108]
Taibbi received a visit from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents the day he testified to Congress about the Twitter Files. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has demanded that IRS turn over copies of documents related to its search.[109]
In February 2024, Taibbi revealed that he and Musk had a falling out which culminated in Musk messaging him, "You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack".[110]
Taibbi argues that both sides of the political media spectrum are complicit in dividing the country and fueling hate.[14] In 2019, Taibbi self-published the book Hate Inc., a critique of the mainstream media landscape.[111] Reviewing the book for Paste, Jason Rhode called it a "brilliant indictment of American media", praising the majority of the book but criticized Taibbi for "[spending] a section of his book both-sidesing both MSNBC and FOX".[112]
During the Munk Debates on November 22, 2022, Taibbi and conservative Douglas Murray successfully argued in favor of the motion "Be it resolved, don't trust Mainstream Media".[113][114]
In a June 2023 interview with The Hub, Taibbi said that "I want the mainstream media to succeed. I think it needs to. The countries are not healthy if they don't have a functioning mass media and nobody believes them. And I think increasingly that's kind of the problem, is there's this lingering worsening trust issue that can only be addressed by dealing with some of the factual issues."[115]
In October 2019, Taibbi argued that the whistleblower in the Trump–Ukraine scandal was not a "real whistleblower" because the whistleblower would have had their life affected by prosecution or being sent to prison.[119] Taibbi also quoted former CIA analyst Robert Baer who argued that the whistleblower was part of a "palace coup against Trump."[119]
In response to the March 30, 2023 indictment of Donald Trump, Taibbi said, "If presidents think they will be chased into jail under thin pretexts as ex-presidents, they'll try even harder to never leave office. This is how autocracies are born."[120]
Hunter Biden
Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, Taibbi said that the problem "is not even so much whether or not that story was important or whether it was terribly damning, it was more the behavior of the media during that story that was really troubling. Not just turning a blind eye to it being suppressed, but also as we found out, planning these what they call a tabletop exercise to 'How should we all respond when this story comes out?'".[115][third-party source needed]
Assessments
In 2021, Ross Barkan of New York Magazine wrote, "Taibbi is—or was, depending on your view—one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of his generation." He continued, "Taibbi's critics view him as a reporter turned red-pilled culture warrior chasing subscriptions", while "Taibbi's defenders say he hasn't changed. Rather, it's the world that has grown more illiberal and hysterical." Taibbi argued that he had not changed, but rather that reactions to Trump had "fundamentally changed the business".[14] In 2023, Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine wrote that when Taibbi attacked Hillary Clinton "as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of right and left media personalities, progressives gave him the cold shoulder."[85]
Personal life
Taibbi is married to Jeanne,[2] a family physician.[121] They have three children.[122]
2023. The inaugural Dao Prize of $100,000 for the "Twitter Files" to Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger. The prize is awarded by the National Journalism Center in partnership with the Daofeng and Angela Foundation. The prize began after Gabe Kaminsky, an investigative reporter, was awarded the National Journalism Center's inaugural prize for excellence in investigative journalism in 2022.[127][128][129]
^Rampell, Ed. "Matt Taibbi." The Progressive, vol. 78, no. 7-8, July–Aug. 2014, pp. 65+.
^ abTaibbi, Mike (January 20, 2009). "Obama's story inspires search for roots". NBC News. Archived from the original on January 30, 2016. Retrieved April 2, 2016. I didn't exactly dive into the task but did go as far as to locate a longtime official of the Foundling Hospital. A month after I'd related information about the Taibbi family and the skeletal story I'd been told about my birth and infancy, I received a short letter from that official. All she could add to the few facts I'd been told, she wrote, was that my birth mother was "an attractive young Filipino-Hawaiian girl named Camila, a girl of average intelligence, all of whose siblings died in childbirth." My father, she added, was likely "An American serviceman with the last name "Denny," address unknown.
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