Lecture: Matt Taibbi
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At a New York University lunchtime lecture, Matt Taibbi, journalist and author of the upcoming book Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats, spoke about his nontraditional career choices and experiences in both the mainstream and alternative media.
“I always wanted to live my own life first and then write about it. It was always experience first,” he said. “I found over the years that people who travel to different countries, immerse themselves and then write about it have a much better chance of being published than those who sit in New York trying to sell articles after graduation.”
When he graduated from Bard College, Taibbi headed for Europe in the early ’90s, where he played professional baseball for the Red Army in Russia and then professional basketball in Mongolia. At 24, he sold an article about his experience as the “Mongolian Dennis Rodman.” After his stint as an athlete, Taibbi started the alternative, youth-oriented, English-language magazine The eXile in Russia. “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,” he said.
“I found over the years that people who travel to different countries, immerse themselves and then write about it have a much better chance of being published than those who sit in New York trying to sell articles after graduation.”
There was the time when the staff decided to put a whole issue in French, just because they felt like it. There was another time when they paid prostitutes to come to their offices for two hours and then told the prostitutes to write anything in the allotted time. And they hired an ex-KGB spy to wiretap the Kremlin, after which they left the country for fear of being arrested.
Along with the pranks, the magazine covered important issues such as the handling of aid money in Russia, or the way the World Bank distributed loans. “It was a conscious exercise against mainstream journalism,” Taibbi said. “We played a lot of practical jokes. People would always say, ‘You can’t do all this dumb stuff and serious journalism at the same time.’ It’s anathema for American publications to be all over the map like we were.”
Taibbi came back to the United States after seven years in Russia and moved to Buffalo, N.Y., to start another alternative publication called The Beast. He admitted that economic realities made it hard for the paper to thrive without corporate advertisements. “It’s difficult for an innovative publication to survive in the U.S.,” he said. “The big stations and publications are at an advantage here because you have to have the finances to do what you want.”
He cited the high threat of libel in the United States and low finances as other hurdles for new, alternative publications such as The Beast, which continues to struggle. “Accountability to advertisers ends up being something you think about a lot,” Taibbi said. “The things we did in Russia we weren’t able to do here.”
After Taibbi left The Beast, he wrote for The Nation and Playboy, among others. He currently writes for the New York Press and is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. “Out of financial necessity, I ended up being pushed in this direction,” he said of his move into the mainstream media.
Taibbi also spoke about his time on the 2004 campaign trail. He described the experience as extremely insular. “The problem I had was that we never had contact with the outside world. You go from the plane with the candidate, to a town hall with supporters of the candidate, to a hotel. You never get to see anything bad,” he said.
Taibbi also likened the social dynamic of the campaign to high school. “All the popular kids sit up in the front of the plane, so it was the Washington Post, The New York Times reporters. All the losers get sent to the back - literally,” he said with a laugh. For his New York Press column, Taibbi kept a tally of the worst campaign journalists. In the end, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times triumphed over Howard Fineman of Newsweek for the honors.
Taibbi felt it was his duty to cover the campaign as he saw it. “The most toxic thing about the campaign plane was how cool everybody thought they were,” he said, adding that he hoped he could make everyone feel a little less self-satisfied with his campaign coverage.
Ultimately, Taibbi said it would be presumptuous to think he could teach anyone in the profession about anything. “But what I found is that if you just go and do a story and then try to sell it, it puts you in a better position in the end,” he said. “I think that’s a really good way to do it.”