re: #283 Charles Johnson

Start-Up Site Hires Critic of Wall St.

I wonder if Greenwald and Omidyar will hire anyone who will give some balance to their $250M future of journalism project?

re: #284 Gus

Matt Taibbi will fit right in.

More than you know:

Controversy and confrontation[edit]

In March 2001, as editor of the magazine The eXile, Taibbi burst into the office of New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines and threw a cream pie spiked with horse semen into his face, after Taibbi’s magazine had awarded Wines the title of “worst journalist” in Russia.[18]
In March 2005, Taibbi’s satirical essay, “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope”,[19] published in the New York Press, was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. Subsequently, the editor who approved the column was fired.[20] 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 hia “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”.[21]
Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, and accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini’s volunteered opinion that Taibbi’s book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was “redundant and discursive”.[22] Taibbi later described the incident as “an aberration from how I’ve behaved in the last six or seven years”.[23]
After the death of conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, in March 2012, Taibbi wrote an obituary in Rolling Stone, titled “Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche”. Many conservatives were angered by the obituary, though Taibbi claimed that it was “at least half an homage,” claiming respect for aspects of Breitbart’s style but also alluding to Breitbart’s own openly derisive obituary of Ted Kennedy.
In June 2013, Taibbi and numerous other celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Bradley Manning.[24][25]

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