Matt Taibbi: Muckraker Turned Magazine-Maker

By Matthew Shaer, New York Magazine

09 March 14

att Taibbi, the �former enfant terrible of �political journalism, limps into a cozy diner on �Chambers Street, in Tribeca a �Russian-style fur cap pulled over his ears, a half-formed apology for his lateness already on his lips. �I am�I must have�did I keep you waiting?�

Informed he is actually seven �minutes early, his shoulders slump in relief. �Okay,� the lanky 44-year-old says, with a toothy grin. �Good. You�ll have to excuse me. It�s been a crazy time for me.�

This is Matt Taibbi, circa 2014: �deferential, polite, very busy. In mid-�February, shortly after the birth of his first child, Taibbi announced he was leaving Rolling Stone, where he has worked for almost a decade, to start a digital magazine for First Look Media, the company owned by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The last few weeks have been consumed with business matters�hiring editorial staff, signing off on designs. Taibbi won�t discuss the exact format of the new venture, nor its name�that�s still being worked out, too�but he sees it focusing, in part, on the same matters of corporate malfeasance he�s been covering for years.

�What I�m hoping to capture is the simultaneously funny and satirical voice that you got with Spy magazine,� he says. �The whole thing will probably be a little different than what a lot of people expect.�

What people expect, of course, is the �ribald, loudly antagonistic voice of a writer who is, in his own words, �full of outrage.� The guy who compared Goldman Sachs to a �vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.� The reporter who dropped acid, donned a Viking hat and wraparound �sunglasses, and had a nice casual chat with the former deputy head of the Office of National Drug Policy, the same policymaker responsible for the �This Is Your Brain on Drugs� advertising campaign. And the person who, as the editor of a Moscow paper, marched into the local offices of the Times and slammed a pie filled with horse semen into the face of a reporter he deemed a �hack.� The �unfiltered, uncowed Matt Taibbi who once dumped coffee on an interviewer from Vanity Fair and then chased him down the street.

But despite his newfound personal courtesy, none of Taibbi�s anger at the �toothlessness� of the media has dissipated. �I think it�s a lost art in this country�developing that narrative voice where readers connect with you as a human being,� he says, harpooning a stray piece of scrambled egg. �They want to see how you react individually to things. And if you think something is outrageous, and you write about it in a tone without outrage, then that�s just deception, you know?�

Taibbi says his decision to leave Rolling Stone was predicated in part on the need to make a change and �keep from falling into a pattern,� and partly by his desire to �be on Glenn�s side.� Glenn being Glenn Greenwald, who, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, is currently editing another First Look property, the national-security-centric The Intercept, which has been live since February. �Glenn�s in this position of being a reporter trying to put out material that came from a whistle-blower, and now they�re both essentially in exile. It�s crazy. If the press corps that existed in the �60s and �70s had seen this situation, they�d be rising as one and denouncing the government for it,� Taibbi says.

Like former Washington Post scribe Ezra Klein, who recently moved to a new venture at Vox Media, Taibbi sees hope in the foundational, start-up mode of journalism. �You�ve got this widespread mistrust of media organizations,� he says, �and the feeling, from people on both sides, that the networks are in the tank for one political party or another. I think people are more willing to trust individuals than they are organizations.�

Taibbi grew up on the South Shore of Boston, where he was by his account a �depressive� kid, content to spend the day burrowing into old Russian novels. �I must have read Dead Souls a hundred times,� he says. �I had this fantasy that I was living in 19th-century Russia.� (It was his Russophilia that led him, in 1992, to move there, where he remained until 2002, working first at the Moscow Times, and then at the eXile, a news�paper he helped found with fellow expat Mark Ames.)

Taibbi�s father is the Emmy Award��winning NBC reporter Mike Taibbi�and along with Gogol and Tolstoy, he also idolized the �middle-class, working-class people� who then populated newsrooms. �They relished their role as jerks who wouldn�t let anything slide. And I was attracted to that,� he says. �I mean, �journalists should be dark, funny, mean people. It�s appropriate for their �antag�onistic, adversarial role.�

Contrast that with today, he argues, when for a lot of reporters, �the appeal of the job has more to do with proximity to power. They want to say they had a beer with Hillary Clinton or whatever it is.� Espe�cially offensive to Taibbi: the �ten�den�cy of his peers to go to great lengths to always give equal weight to opposing arguments. �If there�s one way of looking at things, and there�s another way of looking at things that�s totally ridiculous, you don�t have to give the latter point of view as much �quarter as some contemporary journalism professors might tell you.�

He stands up. Time to leave�the day is full with appointments, and at home, in Jersey City, his wife, a family doctor, and his son are waiting. But first he wants to take a look at the waitress�s tattoo. She holds her hand �forward: I FUCKING LOVE YOU, reads a line of blue cursive script. �Very nice,� Taibbi says appreciatively.

Outside, the temperature has dropped to 19 degrees. Taibbi, tucked into a boxy old coat, says it isn�t as cold as it was when he lived in Moscow, and it�s �pos�itively balmy compared with the climes in �Mongolia, where he, at age 25, had spent a season playing professional basketball. The team was the Mountain Eagles; Taibbi was a small forward. �I�d met this kid playing street ball in Moscow, and he told me about a pro league in Mongolia called the MBA. So I quit my job and took a train to Ulan Bator. They called me �the Mongolian Rodman,� � he says. �I would have stayed. I was having a blast. But I caught pneumonia and I had to go back to Moscow.�

Taibbi lopes southward, toward the cloistered streets of the Financial District. I wonder aloud if he feels that the work he did about Wall Street�on subprime mortgages, and the student-loan apparatus, and the �teeming rat�s nest of corruption� that led to the 2008 meltdown�had made a difference.

�I think the first clue I had was when Occupy happened,� he says. �And I could see that a lot of the stuff that I wrote about was in the background. People carrying papier-�m�ch� squids at some of the protests, which was cool. I think that�s part of what every journalist wants: to have an impact.� Still, that impact has only gone so far. None of the operators Taibbi regards as criminally liable for the crash has been punished; meanwhile, movies like The Wolf of Wall Street are, in his view, idolizing bankers in a way he finds unseemly. �It�s kind of the same way they glamorized the Mafia once upon a time,� he says. �But at least with the Mafia, there was always this lesson that you got at the end, that crime didn�t pay.�

Taibbi pauses at the top of the steps of the Fulton Street subway station. �Big companies like Goldman Sachs have billions to spend on their own publicity. They don�t need us to do that for them. And everyone else in this world does need us to do that for them,� he says, waving good-bye. �I think about that a lot.�