Celebrity Bio: Matt Taibbi's Political Journalism

Matt Taibbi may be the most caustic political journalist in the country. He may also be the most insightful and the most hardworking. His articles for Rolling Stone are some of the most painstakingly researched political pieces appearing in any publication. They’re also generally damning to his subjects, who include Wall Street fat cats, fellow journalists and all stripes of politicians and public figures.

Taibbi doesn’t believe in the brand of objectivity that organizations like CNN and the New York Times practice. “There are a lot of people who take issue with the whole approach, who feel like if you’re going to present this factual case, that it shouldn’t be so polemical and so opinionated and have that much narrative in it,” he told the New York Observer. “I just don’t think there are rules about these things.”

In one of his more famed articles, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a nearly 10,000 word exposé of Goldman Sachs, Taibbi described the investment giant as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” It’s descriptions like this, combined with research that brings to light the fact that Goldman paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits between 1999 and 2002, that shows his rare talent.

There is no quicker way to get on Taibbi’s radar than practicing what he considers bad journalism. He’s thrown a cream pie into the face of a New York Time’s Moscow bureau chief and, more recently, written an online piece called “Lara Logan, You Suck” (before Logan was assaulted during the Egyptian riots). Logan’s offense was saying that she didn’t think it was right that a Rolling Stone colleague of Taibbi’s had built up trust between himself and a source and then used the damaging words that this comfortable source had uttered in an article.

Questions for Matt Taibbi:

1.                  How much assistance does Rolling Stone give you in your research? It seems like you wouldn’t have enough time to write all this and do the research.

2.                  How do you get inspired to write about a topic?

3.                  What do you look for in a quote?

4.                  How do you get people to say such interesting things to you?

5.                  How much time do you spend interviewing people?