Official Bio

Matt Bai is a nationally known American journalist, author and screenwriter.

Journalist

He is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post and writes the Bai Lines newsletter. From 2002 to 2013, he covered politics for The New York Times, where he was 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. He has covered six presidential campaigns.

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.

Author

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 1987 presidential candidate Gary Hart 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 is also the author of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin Press, 2007), which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2007. He contributed a personal essay to the anthology I Married My Mother-in-Law: And Other Tales of In-Laws We Can’t Live With—And Can’t Live Without, published by Riverhead Books in 2006.

In his early twenties, Bai was a speechwriter for UNICEF, where he worked with Audrey Hepburn during the last year of her life.

Screenwriter

Bai also co-wrote, with Jay Carson and Jason Reitman, the feature film adaptation of the book The Front Runner. The film, directed by Reitman and starring Hugh Jackman as Hart, made its national debut in theaters in 2018.

TV Appearances

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.

Background

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.