Matt Taibbi in Madison

Journalist Matt Taibbi was in town last week and I availed myself to listen to him speak at the Memorial Union. I reviewed his previous book, The Great Derangement, here, and he was in town, in part, to promote his latest Griftopia.



(Photo by Matt Hintz of The Badger Herald.)


His talk was roughly divided into two parts. For the first he noted that he never intended to have a career in journalism and then proceeded to explain exactly how he ended up having one. His father was a journalist and Taibbi grew up around them. He harbored ambitions to be a comedic novelist but these dreams were abandoned when he found himself in the USSR at age 21 completely penniless. The young Taibbi decided to become a journalist and began by finding work with the wire services there. His experiences with the Western media in the USSR and the absurdities of the Russian government after the fall of Communism made a great impression on him.

He said that there's always a subtext in American journalism. As an example, he talked about his often futile attempts at pitching stories while he was over in Russia. Our media wanted to hear about Russia's move towards democracy and capitalism and give everything a positive spin. When Taibbi pitched stories about the rise in crime and drug use since the USSR split, he was rejected. However, when a gorilla in the St. Petersburg zoo was going to eat bananas for the first time, the wire service wanted him to cover that. The same for the opening of the first Russian KFC and Ikea.

Taibbi said he never noticed the ideological implications of journalism until he worked for the Moscow Times and covered the unveiling of a portrait of Boris Yeltsin. The paper called him "The Great Democrat". There were other great stories about Yeltsin. In one, Taibbi was present at an interview of a Russian general who had served under Yeltsin. When asked what the real Boris Yeltsin was like, he replied, "Boris Yeltsin no so much human being as undead entity." This impression was bolstered by the story of how the ailing president had to be shown to be in good health on TV so they showed some footage of the man riding a snowmobile. The problem was that Yeltsin was in such bad shape that his hands had to be taped to the handlebars.

Upon returning to the United States in 2002, Taibbi landed a gig covering the 2004 elections and was struck by how cliché-ridden the affair was and how much reporting was dedicated to the press releases given out by the campaigns. Journalists didn't seem interested in digging for answers but Taibbi did.

At this point in his lecture, Taibbi spoke about why gas prices were so high in the summer of 2008. He asked around was found out that the federal government gave a lot of exemptions to speculators in the oil market which drove the price up. But the presidential candidates never mentioned this. McCain took the price spike as a sign to drill more while Obama spoke in terms of conservation.

From here he began to speak about his current topic of interest – the Crash of 2008 and the mortgage industry. The whole affair is exceedingly complicated, he explained, but we were offered an analogy. It's like someone selling oregano as weed. People keep buying it so the dealers will keep selling. In the days of yore, lenders wouldn't lend to people with bad credit. The banks would own the loan for its lifetime. However, when loans started being converted into securities, a great demand rose for loans which could be parceled and sold off. Complicated formulae were developed to give AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities to keep the scheme going.

When all of this went down the shitter, the financial sector appealed to the government to buy these junk securities. And so the state gave money to thieves and the thieves turn around and give money to politicians for such favors.

Taibbi ended his talk by admonishing the audience members to beware of people selling simple narratives.

The Q&A revealed some interesting bits. Regarding the perennial favorite of the Internet's impact on journalism, Taibbi said he still had hope. While investigative journos and fact-checkers were the first to go when cuts were made in newsrooms, the Net has seen a flowering of independent journalism. Someone asked whether there was a system to find out who the dishonest journalists were. Taibbi replied that most reporters he knows are good people. The problem is that they internalize the values of the company for whom they work. They begin to ask themselves not if something is a good story but rather if their editor will take it. Plus there are always financial pressures.

It was a very interesting night and I greatly appreciated how Taibbi explained the bubble in the oil market from a couple years back as well as his explanation for the mortgage crisis which is exceedingly complicated. I felt he did a good job of helping me, a layperson, understand what happened. I'm looking forward to reading Griftopia