badlatitude
Soros-backed
- 33,470
- 7,206
It's funny watching you defend a Russian tool, an ex-heroin user Matt Taibbi. He's working for Russia. Who spends their formative years in a place like Russia unless you're enamored of it?
Russia[edit]
Taibbi moved to Russia[1] in 1992.[28] He lived and worked in Russia and the former USSR for more than six years. He joined Mark Ames in 1997 to co-edit the English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile,[2][1] which was written primarily for the city's expatriate community. The eXile's tone and content were highly controversial. For example, a regular column reported on a member of staff at The eXile hiring a Russian prostitute and then writing a long "review" of the woman and the details of the sexual encounter. Its content was considered either brutally honest and gleefully tasteless or juvenile, misogynistic, and even cruel.[29][30][31] In the US media during this time, Playboy magazine published pieces on Russia by Taibbi or by Taibbi and Ames.[citation needed] Taibbi's first book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, co-authored with Ames, was published in 2000.[32] A film based on the book was under development by producers Ted Hope and James Schamus of Good Machine but did not materialize.[33] He later stated that he was addicted to heroin while he did this early writing.[6]In 2017, Taibbi was criticized for excerpts from a chapter in the book written by Ames that described sexual harassment of employees at The eXile.[34]In a Facebook post responding to the controversy, Taibbi apologized for the "cruel and misogynistic language" used in the book, but said the work was conceived as a satire of the "reprehensible" behavior of American expatriates in Russia and that the description of events in the chapter was "fictional and not true".[35][36] Although the book includes a note saying that it is a work of non-fiction,[37] emails obtained by Paste in 2017 include a representative of the publisher, Grove Press, saying the "statement on the copyright page is incorrect. This book combines exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting and was categorized as nonfiction because there is no category for a book that is both."[38] Two women portrayed in the book told Paste magazine that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book "[ever] happened" and that it was a "ridiculous passage written by Mark".[38]
<snip> In March 2005, Taibbi's satirical essay, "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope",[40] published in the New York Press, was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. He left the paper in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced out over the article.[41] 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". Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze".[42]
