Matt Bai is a nationally known journalist, author and screenwriter. Starting in 2002, he covered three presidential campaigns for the New York Times, where he was the chief political writer for the Sunday magazine and a columnist for the newspaper. He then spent five years as the national political columnist for Yahoo News. In January 2020, he became a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.
Bai’s most recent book, All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid(Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) looks back at the ruinous scandal involving the presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1987 and how it shaped the political and media culture. It was selected as one of the year’s best books by NPR and Amazon and was one of 10 books long-listed for the PEN Faulkner Award in nonfiction.
Bai also co-wrote, with Jay Carson and Jason Reitman, the feature film adapted from the book, titled “The Front Runner.” The film, directed by Reitman and starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.
Bai is also the author of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin Press, 2007), which was a New York TimesNotable Book for 2007. Bai has appeared frequently on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and played himself in a recurring role on season two of the Netflix drama “House of Cards.”
In his early twenties, Bai was a speechwriter for UNICEF, where he worked with Audrey Hepburn during the last year of her life. He began his journalism career as a city desk reporter for the Boston Globe and spent five years as a national correspondent for Newsweek. His international experience includes coverage from Iraq and Liberia.
Bai is a graduate of Tufts and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty awarded him the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He has been a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Harvard, the University of Chicago and Stanford. He serves on the board of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts.
A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, Bai lives with his wife and two children in Bethesda, Maryland. He rarely misses a Yankee game or a Timescrossword. You can follow him (occasionally) on Twitter at @mattbai. Matt enrolled in the Institute’s “Militarization of the Third World” EPIIC program in 1990 and was our symposium’s briefing book editor.
One major pedagogical approach I deployed in EPIIC was to prepare my students in the colloquium model in the standard definition of a colloquium, with its numerous guest lecturers, to expose them to a spectrum of opinions, even purposively radical different perspectives.
Matt intrinsically understood the value of colloquia and wrote this for the University’s Institute CASE statement in 1999, when as an alumnus, he had graduated Columbia University’s School of Journalism, being awarded its prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship , and was a national correspondent for Newsweek.
“Most classroom learning is, by necessity, the reflection of one professor's view, aided by a few select books and media tools that support the point. This is an effective way to teach names and dates, but it does little to encourage students to independently evaluate information. EPIIC is refreshingly different. Students have the opportunity to read a dizzying amount of material from opposite perspectives, to question personally many of the experts themselves, and to discuss their impressions with one another.
In EPIIC it's all right to be conflicted or critical, or even downright wrong now and then; what isn't acceptable is to abdicate your responsibility to think. This is the essence of intellectual leadership. It breeds confidence and wisdom in a world where too many people are simply overwhelmed by the flood of information.
A good friend for decades, his friendship, clarity, self-effacement and directness is tremendously valued and rare.