Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster.
55 Facts About Matt Taibbi
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Matt Taibbi has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports.
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Matt Taibbi later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times.
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In 2002, Matt Taibbi returned to the United States and founded the Buffalo-based newspaper The Beast.
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Matt Taibbi left a year later to work as a columnist for the New York Press.
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In 2008, Matt Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for three columns he wrote for Rolling Stone.
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Matt Taibbi became known for his brazen style, having branded Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid" in a 2009 article.
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In recent years, Matt Taibbi's writing has focused on culture war issues and cancel culture.
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Matt Taibbi has criticized mainstream media including its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
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Matt Taibbi has authored several books, including The Great Derangement ; Griftopia ; The Divide ; Insane Clown President ; I Can't Breathe ; and Hate Inc.
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Matt Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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Matt Taibbi's father, Mike Matt Taibbi, is an NBC television reporter of mixed Filipino and Native Hawaiian descent who was adopted by an Italian-American couple.
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Matt Taibbi's parents separated when he was young and he was largely raised by his mother.
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Matt Taibbi 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.
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Matt Taibbi spent a year abroad studying at Leningrad Polytechnic University, where he finished his credits for graduation from Bard.
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Matt Taibbi was deported in 1992 for writing an article for the Associated Press that was critical of President Islam Karimov.
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At the time of his deportation, Matt Taibbi was the starting left fielder for the Uzbek national baseball team.
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Matt Taibbi moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for a time in the '90s, where he played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association, which, he says, is the only basketball league outside the United States that uses the same rules as the US NBA.
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Matt Taibbi later contracted pneumonia and returned to Boston for surgery.
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Matt Taibbi worked for a short time as an investigator at a Boston-based private detective agency.
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Matt Taibbi lived and worked in Russia and the former USSR for more than six years.
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Matt Taibbi later stated that he was addicted to heroin while he did this early writing.
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Apart from The eXile, Matt Taibbi was employed by the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, where he worked as a sports editor for five months.
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Matt Taibbi contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Trud, Stringer, and Kommersant.
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Matt Taibbi left the paper in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced out over the article.
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Matt 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".
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Matt Taibbi said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze".
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In February 2008, Matt Taibbi contributed a three-minute segment to Real Time with Bill Maher in which he interviewed residents of Youngstown, Ohio before the Ohio primary.
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Matt Taibbi was invited as a guest on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and other MSNBC programs.
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Matt Taibbi has appeared on the Thom Hartmann radio and television shows, and the Imus in the Morning Show on the Fox Business network.
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Matt Taibbi wrote a column, "The Sports Blotter", for the free weekly newspaper, The Boston Phoenix.
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Matt Taibbi covered legal troubles involving professional and amateur athletes.
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Matt Taibbi wrote a weekly political online column, "The Low Post", for the magazine's website.
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Matt Taibbi covered the 2008 United States presidential election in Year of the Rat, a special Rolling Stone diary.
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Matt Taibbi 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.
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In February 2014, Matt Taibbi left Rolling Stone and joined First Look Media to head a financial and political corruption-focused publication, Racket.
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In March 2021, Matt Taibbi announced that Useful Idiots would no longer be released by Rolling Stone and would be moving to Substack.
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In 2018, Matt 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.
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Matt Taibbi stated that he would continue to contribute print features for Rolling Stone and maintain the Useful Idiots podcast with Katie Halper.
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Matt Taibbi branded his 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.
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On December 2,2022, Matt Taibbi began tweeting about and screenshotting emails that executives of Twitter sent each other concerning content moderation in 2020.
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Matt Taibbi's report was in the form of a Twitter thread with screen shots of email exchanges between Twitter executives.
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Matt 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.
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Jeffrey Blehar, writing for National Review, said that Matt 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".
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The third installment, released on December 9,2022, by Matt Taibbi, highlighted events within Twitter leading to Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter.
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The sixth installment, released on December 16,2022, by Matt Taibbi, described how the FBI contacted Twitter to suggest that action be taken against several accounts for allegedly spreading election disinformation.
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On March 9,2023, Matt Taibbi appeared 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.
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The next day, Matt 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.
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Matt Taibbi argues that both sides of the political media spectrum are complicit in dividing the country and fueling hate.
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Matt Taibbi later described the incident as "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years".
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Since the mid-2010s, Matt Taibbi's reporting has increasingly focused on culture war topics and cancel culture.
52.
Matt Taibbi has criticized mainstream media and their coverage of Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
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Matt Taibbi's writing has since polarized readers and fellow journalists.
54.
In 2008, Matt Taibbi was awarded the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary" for his Rolling Stone columns.
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Matt Taibbi won a Sidney Award in 2009 for his article "The Great American Bubble Machine".