Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

The Capitol fiasco was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, revealing a country driven to literal combat over frustrations accrued in separate factual universes. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—himself an notorious double-talker and avoider-of-truths—accurately summed us up as a country just before the fracas. We are, he said: Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

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Some thought the Internet would cure cancer by uniting great minds in instant transglobal communication. The actual endgame involved sites that merged porn and political thought. 4chan is bananas, an online massage parlor where white guys tell Black jokes and onanize to Mein Kampf. A typical 4chan post is a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, next to a question: “Are there women who aren’t nagging c—ts . . . ? Have they ever shut up? How do you make them, short of beating them or divorce?” The conspiratorial connective tissue on a lot of these sites, ostensibly about an insider named Q with access to the White House, reporting on Trump’s secret war against a cabal of child-importing pedophile elitist Democrats who may also worship Satan, was insane and hard to follow. It was also mostly beside the point. The core parts of the story were more like emotional themes, i.e. “leftist elites bent on destroying us are cheating their way to despotic rule.” The specifics were increasingly interchangeable, a great fit for Trump’s kaleidoscope mind. As with porn, the customers didn’t show up for the scripts. The payoff was in pure furious spewing, politics fused with forbidden impulses—rape, murder, whatever—in a gurgling mass of “Us. vs. Them” energy. The urges rising from this collective Id are often denounced as populism, a ludicrous betrayal of the term’s original meaning. Whatever the real term for this “movement,” Trump knew how to talk to it. We saw this from the beginning of ...

The bulk of the most extreme messaging about movements like “Stop the Steal” took place in the equivalent of dark pools: message boards, chats, Facebook groups, etc. Icons of Republican media like Fox were often followers to the party, beaten in the rush for ever-crazier conspiratorial explanations by outlets like OAN and Newsmax, which were less squeamish about catering to these audiences horny for extreme culture war.

News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything like there’s no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow? The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, misquotes, or rhetorical let-downs were memory-holed. The American Napoleon generated controversies at such a fantastic rate that stations like CNN and MSNBC (and Fox too) were able to keep ratings high by moving from mania to mania, hyping stories on the way up but not always following them down. The moment the narrative premise of any bombshell started to fray, the next story in line was bumped to the front.

Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him. A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters. They wanted to be in the trenches of information discovery. Audiences were choosing powerful highs over lasting ones. Moreover, if after publication another shoe dropped in the form of mitigating information, audiences were disinterested, even angry. Those updates were betrayals of the entertainment contract, like continuity errors. Companies soon learned there was a downside to once-mandatory ethical practices. Silent edits at newspapers became common, and old standards like the italicized editor’s note at the bottom of the page letting you know this or that story had been “updated” began to disappear.

In the early Trump years, reporters were very concerned with the origin story of Trump’s conspiracy with Russia. When papers like The New York Times were told that a Trump aide named George Papadopoulos triggered the probe after repeating a tale from a mysterious Maltese professor about the Russians having “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Papadopoulos became front page news as the Patient Zero of the conspiracy. The first Times story on this figure came out in October of 2017. Years later, Congress would release testimony from then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe to the effect that the Bureau concluded as early as August, 2016—over a year before the Times story—that evidence “didn’t particularly indicate” that Papadopoulos had any links to any Russians. In fact, McCabe testified that the reason the FBI moved on to Carter Page as a target was that Papadopoulos was understood to be a dead-end (Page proved to be a similar dead-end). Yet Papadopoulos was the predicate for the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe into Trump’s relationship with Russia, the probe that became the Mueller investigation. Blue-state audiences were essentially never told that this investigation was at best grounded in erroneous information. On the day the Horowitz report blew up the pee tape, the Carter Page story, and countless other once-hot scandals, the front page of the New York Times read REPORT DEBUNKS ANTI-TRUMP PLOT IN RUSSIA INQUIRY. Another headline on the same page noted that Trump possibly faced...

The extreme danger from the beginning of the Trump era was not just that the White House might be occupied by an unfit person, but that American institutions might follow him into further disrepute. This happened with institutional media, which responded to a manic, hyperbolic, unreliable president by taking on those same qualities. Their permanent crisis doubled as a political campaign to prevent Trump’s “normalization” and a scheme to boost profits by addicting audiences to a never-ending narrative of moral mania. To keep it up, elite media made the same request of audiences that Trump regularly made to his own fans, that what was said and done ten minutes ago be forgotten in a world where only the present mattered. Memory became taboo, present conflict the only allowable orientation: a utopia of division.

Originally, this book was intended to be a re-thinking of the classic work of media criticism by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. In fact, the original title of the book was going to be Manufacturing Discontent. I’ve carried three books with me everywhere throughout my travels over the years (I’ve traveled a lot in my career as a reporter, living as far away as Mongolia and Uzbekistan). Those were Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, and Manufacturing Consent. Roughly speaking, the first book by Thompson is a great work of journalism, the second, Scoop, is the perfect parody of journalism, and Manufacturing Consent is an academic warning to reporters like myself, describing all the ways in which journalism can be counterproductive, serve power, and generally fail.

I never wanted to be a reporter. My heroes were comic novelists, and I believed what Hunter S. Thompson once said, that “the best fiction is truer than any journalism.” The career I wanted was one producing books that did nothing but provide enjoyment, books that were like close friends you could lean on—what Raymond Chandler’s books have meant to me. But I turned out to be a terrible fiction writer, and defaulted to this work. I always had an uncomfortable relationship with the business, and at some point I made nearly all of the mistakes you’ll read about in this book. In fact, part of what started to pour out when I wrote these chapters was the self-loathing that came with knowing I’d tossed so much red meat to political audiences. Getting plaudits from liberal audiences for writing splenetic features about Mike Huckabee or Fred Thompson or Michelle Bachmann is like a comedian doing a routine in front of a bunch of potsmokers—you can’t tell if the laughs are real.

I started to believe we keep people away from the complexities of these issues, by creating distinct audiences of party zealots who drink in more and more intense legends about one another. We started to turn the ongoing narrative of the news into something like a religious contract, in which the idea was not just to make you mad, but to keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger. Even in what conservatives would call the “liberal” media, we used blunt signals to create audience solidarity. We started to employ anti-intellectualism on a scale I’d never seen before, and it ran through much of the available content.

My dirty little secret is that I’ve never particularly cared about politics. My personal religion is neither right nor left but absurdist. I think the world is basically ridiculous and terrible, but also beautiful. We try our best, or sometimes we don’t, but either way, we typically fail in the end. Humanity to me is the Three Stooges, and gets funnier the more it attempts to deny it. I don’t think this all the time, but it’s a guiding principle. I vote, and am involved in small ways with a few activist causes, but I try not to take the circus so seriously that it distracts from the more important business of being a dad, a husband, etc. Under torture I would say one party is better than the other, and I will even give money or volunteer if asked, but this is different from energetic advocacy. I doubt this is an uncommon view. Covering campaigns, you meet a lot of people who care more about their cats than elections (they are never quoted in campaign stories, of course). Most people don’t vote, which I’ve found is most often an expression of disgust or sarcastic indifference toward the range of political choices offered. I don’t go that far, but I do try to keep enough distance from politics to keep it in perspective.

I have, of course, worried this book will not make sense to either of our two reigning brands of political partisan. Democrats may react with more anger than Republicans. The Appendix explaining Rachel Maddow’s presence on the cover may do little to alleviate this. Comparing MSNBC to Fox in any way will be deemed unforgivable. But it’s not a hot take. The subject here is the phasing out of independent journalism, replacing it with deeply politicized programming on both “sides.” Which “side” is better is immaterial: neither approach is journalism.

Conservatives meanwhile will probably hate the book for a variety of reasons, beginning with my natural antipathy for Republican politics, which is fine. To people of both persuasions, I would say, this book is intended to help start a conversation about how much of our disdain for each other is real, and how much of it is a product of the media machine. I despair at the blame-a-thon of modern political media and wonder all the time if I didn’t help construct this new attitude with the flamboyant insults I put in print for years. Worse, today’s media debate has left its sense of humor behind, and we now argue even minor issues as life-or-death matters, despite not even knowing each other. People who would certainly engage in courteous chats at their kids’ birthday parties freely trade horrific threats on Twitter. It’s insane.

Manufacturing Consent is a dazzling book. True, like a lot of co-written books, and especially academic books, it’s written in slow, grinding prose. But for its time, it was intellectually flamboyant, wild even. The ideas in it radiated defiance. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model, they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw. The book’s central idea was that censorship in the United States was not overt, but covert. The stage-managing of public opinion was “normally not accomplished by crude intervention” but by the keeping of “dissent and inconvenient information” outside permitted mental parameters: “within bounds and at the margins.” The key to this deception is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda is absent. Manufacturing Consent explains that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.

Young reporters learn early on what is and is not permitted behavior. They learn to recognize, almost more by smell than reason, what is and is not a “good story.” Chomsky and Herman described this policing mechanism using the term “flak.” Flak was defined as “negative responses to a media statement or program.” They gave examples in which corporate-funded think tanks like The Media Institute or the anti-communist Freedom House would deluge media organizations that ran the wrong kinds of stories with “letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits” and other kinds of pressure. What was the wrong kind of story? Here we learned of another part of the propaganda model, the concept of worthy and unworthy victims. Herman and Chomsky defined the premise as follows: A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. Under this theory, a Polish priest murdered by communists in the Reagan years was a “worthy” victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole messes of priests and nuns around the same time was a less “worthy” story.

The Cronkite editorial sparked a “debate” that continues to the present. On the right, it is said that we should have kept fighting in Vietnam, in spite of those meddling commies in the media. The progressive take is that Cronkite was right, and we should have realized the war wasn’t “winnable” years earlier. Doing so would have saved countless American lives, this thinking goes. These two positions still define the edges of what you might call the “fairway” of American thought. The uglier truth, that we committed genocide on a fairly massive scale across Indochina—ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries—is pre-excluded from the history of that period. Instead of painful national reconciliation surrounding episodes like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the CIA-backed anti-communist massacres in places like Indonesia, or even the more recent horrors in Middle Eastern arenas like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, we mostly ignore narrative-ruining news about civilian deaths or other outrages. A media that currently applauds itself for calling out the lies of Donald Trump (and they are lies) still uses shameful government-concocted euphemisms like “collateral damage.” Our new “Democracy Dies in Darkness” churlishness has yet to reach the Pentagon, and probably never will.

One of the pillars of the “propaganda model” in the original Manufacturing Consent was that the media used anti-communism as an organizing religion. The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter heretical thinkers, who as luck would have it were often socialists. They even used it as a club to police people who weren’t socialists (I would see this years later, when Howard Dean was asked a dozen times a day if he was “too left” to be a viable candidate). But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire took a little wind out of the anti-communist religion. Chomsky and Herman addressed this in their 2002 update of Manufacturing Consent, in which they wrote: The force of anti-communist ideology has possibly weakened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the virtual disappearance of socialist movements across the globe, but this is easily offset by the greater ideological force of the belief in the “miracle of the market…”

A new dynamic entered the job of reporting. For generations, news directors had only to remember a few ideological imperatives. One, ably and voluminously described by Chomsky and Herman, was, “America rules: pay no attention to those napalmed bodies.” We covered the worthy victims, ignored the unworthy ones, and that was most of the job, politically. The rest of the news? As one TV producer put it to me in the nineties, “The entire effect we’re after is, ‘Isn’t that weird?’” Did you hear about that guy in Michigan who refused to mow his lawn even when the town ordered him to? Weird! And how about that drive-thru condom store that opened in Cranston, Rhode Island? What a trip! And, hey, what happened in the O.J. trial today? That Kato Kaelin is really a doof! And I love that lawyer who wears a suede jacket! He looks like a cowboy! TV execs learned Americans would be happy if you just fed them a nonstop succession of National Enquirer–style factoids (this is formalized today in meme culture). The New York Times deciding to cover the O.J. freak show full-time broke the seal on the open commercialization of dumb news that among other things led to a future where Donald Trump could be a viable presidential candidate.

The news media is in crisis. Polls show that a wide majority of the population no longer has confidence in the press. Chomsky himself despairs at this, noting in my discussion with him (at the end of this book) that Manufacturing Consent had the unintended consequence of convincing readers not to trust the media. There are many ways of mistrusting something, but people who came away from Manufacturing Consent with the idea that the media peddles lies misread the book. Papers like the New York Times, for the most part, do not traffic in outright deceptions. The overwhelming majority of commercial news reporting is factual (with one conspicuous exception I’ll get into later on), and the individual reporters who work in the business tend to be quite stubborn in their adherence to fact as a matter of principle. (Sadly, in the time it’s taken to write this book, even this has begun to change some). Still, people should trust most reporters, especially local reporters, who tend to have real beats (like statehouses or courts), have few of the insular prejudices of the national media, and don’t deserve the elitist tag. The context in which reporters operate is most often the problem.

This book is intended as an insider’s guide to those distortions. The technology underpinning the modern news business is sophisticated and works according to a two-step process. First, it creates content that reinforces your pre-existing opinions, and, after analysis of your consumer habits, sends it to you. Then it matches you to advertisers who have a product they’re trying to sell to your demographic. This is how companies like Facebook and Google make their money: telling advertisers where their likely customers are on the web. The news, basically, is bait to lure you into a pen where you can be sold sneakers or bath soaps or prostatitis cures or whatever else studies say people of your age, gender, race, class, and political persuasion tend to buy.

They picked that story just for you to hear. It is like the parable of Kafka’s gatekeeper, guarding a door to the truth that was built just for you. Across the street, down the MSNBC alley, there’s an opposite story, and set of storefronts, built specifically for someone else to hear. People need to start understanding the news not as “the news,” but as just such an individualized consumer experience—anger just for you. This is not reporting. It’s a marketing process designed to create rhetorical addictions and shut any non-consumerist doors in your mind. This creates more than just pockets of political rancor. It creates masses of media consumers who’ve been trained to see in only one direction, as if they had been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in blinders, looking only one way.

we’re taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we’re all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought. Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest. Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both. I looked back at thirty years of deceptive episodes—from Iraq to the financial crisis of 2008 to the 2016 election of Donald Trump—and found that we in the press have increasingly used intramural hatreds to obscure larger, more damning truths. Fake controversies of increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger problems. We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.

One additional bizarre Trump-inspired change to reporting that took place in 2016 involved polls: we increasingly ignored data favorable to Trump and pushed surveys suggesting a Clinton landslide. The Times ran a piece in October pronouncing the race essentially over, telling us to expect a “sweeping victory at every level” for Clinton. The papers all throughout the race were full of confident predictions and demographic analyses with titles like, “Relax, Trump Can’t Win” and “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom.” These stories were a crucial poker tell. The ostensible reason for our new adversarial posture was to advocate against Trump. But underreporting the seriousness of the Trump threat didn’t help Democrats at all. If anything, the opposite was true. Defanged data reporting dulled attention to correctable weaknesses in the Clinton support base and, who knows, perhaps even motivated a voter or a thousand to stay home out of unconcern.

Election Day, 2016 was a historic blow to American journalism. It was as if we’d invaded Iraq and discovered there were no WMDs in the same few hours. Almost immediately, new conventional wisdom coalesced to explain the coverage failures in ways that incentivized future mistakes. Chomsky and Herman wrote about how the elite reaction to America’s military loss in Vietnam was to create a revisionist history that not only steered us away from the reality of American crimes and policy failures, but set the stage for future invasions and occupations. The post-Vietnam story blamed an “excess of democracy” for the loss, especially in the media: loserific criticism of our prospects for victory undermined the popular resolve to keep fighting a winnable war. So the press sheepishly abandoned a lot of its “excessively democratic” practices. We stopped showing deaths in battle, coffins coming home, etc.

I thought the failure of the press in 2016 would lead to a prolonged period of introspection and re-evaluation. Instead, we created an environment in which reporters are more committed than ever to the elite policing behaviors that won us Trump in the first place. To me the 2016 campaign was just a particularly dramatic demonstration of the “siloing” phenomenon, in which media content—not just news, but all content, entertainment included—is tailored for the consumption of highly individualized demographics.

When it got caught clucking over how rich Trump was making them, big media was faced with a choice: cover him less, or find a way to justify covering him more. We chose door number two. The rhetorical trick we employed was an openly adversarial stance, supposedly a bold new step. The papers will tell you this was an ethical/political choice. Perhaps it was, in some cases. But as much as anything else, it was a business decision. Most outlets, whether they admitted it or not, basically chose to double down with half the news audience, rather than concede all of it.

Two data points stood out after 2016. One involved those polls that showed confidence in the media dipping to all-time lows. The other involved unprecedented ratings. People believed us less, but watched us more. We are now eating into the profits of the entertainment business. Completing a decades-long slide, the news has become a show, and not just in campaign years, but always.

So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising. That’s not why we do what we do. But it is why we’re allowed to operate this way. It boggles my mind that people think they’re practicing real political advocacy by watching major corporate TV, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.

The shows are not designed to expand mental horizons. They’re about two things: reinforcing the notion that the world is split in half (what Cohen calls the “two and only two” message), and the spectacle of combat. “These TV debates are not about ideas or solutions or ideology, but simply partisan sniping and talking-point recitation,” Cohen says now. “I enjoy a genuine right-left philosophical debate, when it’s between serious analysts or journalists—as opposed to Democrat vs. Republican BS artists, and party hacks.” In his book, Cohen referenced an old joke: What do pro wrestling and the U.S. Senate have in common? Both are dominated by overweight white guys pretending to hurt each other. He said, “The intellectual level of cable news is one step above pro wrestling.” Cohen wrote that over a decade ago. Today the news is at the level of pro wrestling. This is one reason we have a WWE performer in the White House. It’s the ultimate synthesis of politics and entertainment, and the core of it all is the ritual of conflict. Without conflict, there’s no product.

The message to reporters working in big corporate news organizations was that long-form investigative reports targeting big commercial interests weren’t forbidden exactly, just not something your boss was likely to gush over. “I don’t know if it was my case or just common sense, but there are some things you just know,” says Akre. “Like if you want to work in TV in Florida, you’re not going to do exposés on Disney.” “Consumer reporting” instead increasingly focused on softer targets. “What you get instead is an exposé about some little Vietnamese restaurant. Because they won’t fight back, obviously,” says Akre. She drops her voice as she imitates a consumer-report VO: “You know, it’s ‘We’ll take you… Behind the restaurant door…’”

“Trump lied about 3,000 deaths in the Puerto Rico hurricane” is a story you can put in almost any big-city newspaper. If your audience is conservative, you can go with the flipped version, about how the media is out to screw the Donald: “No, it was Democrats who lied about the numbers!” And what about Donald Trump’s border policies separating families? Aren’t they inhumane, literally concentration camps? Concentration camps on our border? Yes, say some outlets. But Trump says it was Obama’s policy! No way, says Politifact, a fact-checking site preferred by liberal audiences. Well, sort of, says Obama’s former Homeland Security Chief Jeh Johnson, who went on Fox and “freely admitted” the Obama administration did jail families and separate children in what he called a “controversial” policy. If you weren’t watching Fox but MSNBC, which ran “horrifying” details of new DHS reports of “just plain inhumane” conduct, you’d be right back where you probably started if you belonged to their target demographic: outraged by a brutal Trump policy. In the days when we had a public interest standard that mandated companies using the public airwaves produce at least some non-sociopathic, non-commercial content, or when we had a Fairness Doctrine that required that reporters seek out credible representatives of different viewpoints, all of this back and forth would typically be weighed in one story.

The best news stories take issues and find a way to make readers think hard about them, especially inviting them to consider how they themselves contribute to the problem. You want people thinking, “I voted for what?” Most problems are systemic, bipartisan, and bureaucratic, and most of us, by voting or not voting, paying taxes or not, own a little bit of most disasters.

If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it. Or better to say: a reporter or two might cover it, but it’s never picked up. It doesn’t take over a news cycle, doesn’t become a thing. The bloated military budget? Mass surveillance? American support for dictatorial regimes like the cannibalistic Mbasogo family in Equatorial Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia? Our culpability in proxy-nation atrocities in places like Yemen or Palestine? The drone assassination program? Rendition? Torture? The drug war? Absence of access to generic or reimported drugs? Nah. We just don’t do these stories. At least, we don’t do them anywhere near in proportion to their social impact. They’re hard to sell. And the ability to market a story is everything.

In Europe and the United States, she zeroed in on programs like Quantitative Easing that overworked the money-producing powers of the state and pumped giant sums of invented cash into the finance sector. She called this a “massive, unprecedented, coordinated effort to provide liquidity to [the] banking systems on a grand scale.” These policies are a kind of permanent welfare mechanism for the financial sector, and have had a dramatic impact around the world. They’ve accelerated an already serious financial inequality problem and addicted the banking sector to an unsustainable subsidy. There’s only one problem, at least in terms of editors. You can’t sell this story as any one party’s fault. “It is a purely bipartisan situation that things are as fucked up as they are,” laughs Prins. The central banking policies have been supported by what we think of as the entire range of allowable political thought in America, i.e. from Bush-era Republicans who signed off on the original bank bailouts through the Obama Democrats who followed. Prins’s recent book on the topic, Collusion, describes a classic systemic problem, one that ought to have deep interest to “both” camps. For liberals, it’s a story about an obscene subsidy of the very rich, while for conservatives, it’s a profound story about the corruption of capitalism. But TV bookers have struggled to figure out how to market Prins. She tells a story of a TV host who, in a troubled voice, quizzed her off air. “He was like, ‘I can...

The notion of a crisis caused by a bipartisan confluence of powerful interests doesn’t fit into the way we cover news today. It would be hard to do a story saying conservative higher-education profiteers like the DeVos family are gorging themselves on non-dischargeable, over-available federal student debt of the type congressional Democrats pushed for decades. This might be the truth, but it cannot be marketed, because it doesn’t compute, not for modern news audiences.

By the early 2000s, TV stations had learned to cover politics exactly as they covered sports, a proven profitable format. The presidential election especially was reconfigured into a sports coverage saga. It was perfect: eighteen months of scheduled contests, a preseason (straw polls), regular season (primaries), and playoffs (the general), stadium events, a sub-genre of data reporting (it’s not an accident that sabermetrics guru Nate Silver fit so seamlessly into political coverage). TV news stations baldly copied visual “live variety” sports formats for coverage of primary elections, debates, election night, and soon enough, Sunday “discussion” shows like Meet the Press. If you’ve noticed, the sets bear an eerie resemblance to NFL pre-game shows. There’s a reason for that. “Panels are typically two conservative advocates versus two mainstream reporters/analysts who are obviously moderate libs but not allowed to admit it or strongly advocate much of anything,” is how Cohen, formerly of Crossfire, puts it. Chuck Todd is Chris Berman is James Brown is Wolf Blitzer. The professional talker stands on one side of the panel and tosses to the various energetic advocates for and against the team’s chances (Ana Navarro is Terry Bradshaw is Steve Mariucci is Van Jones), then they mediate the blather when everyone agrees and it all breaks down into conventional wisdom.

By 2016 we’d raised a generation of viewers who had no conception of politics as an activity that might or should involve compromise. Your team either won or lost, and you felt devastated or vindicated accordingly. We were training rooters instead of readers. Since our own politicians are typically very disappointing, we particularly root for the other side to lose. Being an American in the 1 percent era is like being a Jets fan whose only conceivable pleasure is rooting against the Patriots. We’re haters, but what else is there? The famous appearance of Jon Stewart on Crossfire in 2004 unmasked the conceit of all of this. The comedian blasted Carlson (from the right!) and Begala (from the left!) for “partisan hackery” and nailed them with a simple request: stop fighting and say something nice about an opposing-party politician.

Even I could probably think of something nice to say about George W. Bush, his family, his voters, something. But in this business, everyone is on a side, and we’re always fighting, never looking for common ground. It ruins everyone’s suspension of disbelief if we do.

Roger Ailes at Fox started this. He made the whole concept of “balance” an inside joke among right-wing media. It’s the reason the preposterous slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” was so effective, both for recruiting conservative viewers and infuriating liberals. Ailes used to say: “The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.” Translation: you needed to pull hard the other way to achieve “balance” overall. “Fair and balanced,” in other words, was a rip on the idea that standard, dull, third-person New York Times–style media was already balanced. Twenty years before it would become a popular rallying cry on the other side, Roger Ailes was essentially using an argument about “false balance” to market Fox.

DEMOCRATS, STUDENTS, AND FOREIGN ALLIES FACE THE REALITY OF A TRUMP PRESIDENCY The Times of course is not obligated to celebrate a Trump presidency, but this headline was a major stylistic departure. It was less reporting than audience signaling, a blunt list of demographics: “THE SANE AMONG US BRACE FOR TRUMP PRESIDENCY.” Spayd pushed back when Carlson called this “advocacy,” and said it was something more subtle and maybe worse: an “unrecognized point of view that comes from… being in New York in a certain circle, and seeing the world in a certain way.” In a classic example of the always-attacking style of TV conservatives, Carlson didn’t accept the olive branch Spayd was trying to offer. Instead, he just kept pounding away. He quizzed her on reporters’ political bias. Spayd had protested that the paper’s reporters tried hard to be fair and professional, but Carlson scoffed. “I would believe you,” he said, “except that I know for a fact it isn’t true.” He then read off a series of horrified anti-Trump tweets written by Times line reporters. Liam Stack’s “The electoral college was meant to stop men like Trump from taking office” was an example. “Are you kidding me?” Carlson snapped. Spayd nodded and said, “Yeah, I think it’s outrageous.” This was a line that would be much howled over, because it gave pro-Trump types and people like Carlson a talking point, another unforgivable offense. But Spayd’s point was not that having political views is bad, or that too many reporter...

Two years ago, unnerved by a lot of the same comments about “false balance,” I wrote: “The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption.” This is more or less where we are now, and nobody seems to think this is bad or dysfunctional. This is despite the fact that in this format (especially given the individuated distribution mechanisms of the Internet, like the Facebook news feed) the average person will no longer even see—ever—derogatory reporting about his or her own “side.”

Fox promoted Sean Hannity as their perfect vision of conservative manhood. The rectum-faced blowhard was celebrated for his fake daily victories over the intellectual Washington Generals act that was Alan Colmes. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, who, in his early days, was a serviceably witty top-40 disc jockey in Pittsburgh, Hannity was charmless. He was not literate like William Safire or Bill Buckley, nor was he an entertainingly unstable wreck like Glenn Beck, nor could he talk volubly about Marx and other thinkers like Michael Savage, a person who clearly has read more than three or four books. Hannity wouldn’t know the difference between Marcuse and a cucumber, the Frankfurt School and a frankfurter. He won fake arguments, preened, and spewed constant aggression. After 9/11, one of his signature lines of attack was that liberals were in league with terrorists.

Glenn Beck would take Hannity’s Neville Chamberlain thread and run lap after lap with it, pioneering the “Your neighbor is literally Hitler” movement. Beck was awesome at this. Al Gore was Hitler. Obama was constantly Hitler. The National Endowment of the Arts was Hitler! (“It’s propaganda… you should look up the name ‘Goebbels.’”). ACORN was Hitler. The bailouts were Hitler (well, they actually were a little bit Hitler). Comedian Lewis Black had a hilarious Daily Show freakout when Beck compared even the Peace Corps to the SS! As Black put it, it was “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, except there’s just one degree, and Kevin Bacon is Hitler!” Beck was a mixed-metaphor enthusiast who was capable of calling a target both fascist and communist, Hitler and Stalin, in the same telecast. But his money gimmick was Hitler. It won him a huge audience, until it also ruined him.

The financial bailouts had been an extraordinary betrayal of the population by the political class, which is why Trump scored when he painted Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton as creatures of Goldman Sachs. Citizens United meant political bribery on a grand scale was legal, and this theme helped Trump knock out Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. He ripped the Koch Brothers, and denounced his primary opponents as sockpuppet fronts for corporate PACs. Then he did the same to Hillary Clinton. These clowns are just fronts for someone else’s money, Trump told voters. With me, I am the money. Trump, like all great con artists, depended upon true details to sell lies.

racism as the sole explanation for Trump’s rise was suspicious for a few reasons. Chief of which being that it completely absolved either political party (both the Republican and Democratic party establishments were rejected in 2016, in some cases for overlapping reasons) of having helped create the preconditions for Trump. Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes.

When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.”

We don’t want you thinking about anything complicated: not non-voters, not war fatigue, not the collapse of the manufacturing sector, not Fed policy, none of that. None of what happened in 2016 is your fault: it’s all the pure evil of white nationalism. For conservatives, it’s the opposite: don’t believe anything in the New York Times, don’t think about the impact of upper-class tax cuts and deregulation, just stay in your lane. Remember, you are surrounded by determined enemies, out to destroy tradition, the nuclear family, increase your taxes, take your job and your gun, and remove your president by any means, legal or illegal. It’s a fight for all the marbles. Politics today is about one side against the other side, and there’s only one take allowed: pure aggression.

If your only experience of life was watching these shows, you might conclude that the chief problem of American politics is one of tactics. Why does Paul Begala let Tucker Carlson just pound away at him like that? Why is he such a wuss? When you watched these shows, you were always looking at an aggressor and a conciliator. “From the right” always looked more confident because it was representing a “real” political agenda.

The modern Trump is pretty much exactly Buchanan, right down to the race views and the appropriation of trade issues, only he’s better at playing the heel. For most of liberal America, the election played out like an old Crossfire episode. Trump pounded away at Clinton, and refused to take back even the most shameless behaviors. Meanwhile Clinton tried to observe decorum, apologized for her “unforced errors” like the “deplorables” comment, and was unrewarded for her efforts.

Begala’s problem wasn’t that he was a weenie and insufficiently aggressive: it was that he didn’t stand for anything. This was Stewart’s larger point about how the phony combat was “hurting America.” It wasn’t educational, it wasn’t political in any meaningful way. After Trump won, though, another consensus formed. Liberal America had to be less polite. Samantha Bee was a pioneer, calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.” Creaky old Robert De Niro (He was tough! He once played a boxer!) won the Internet when he said “Fuck Trump!” at an awards show. When a restaurant owner in DC refused to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the wake of the Trump-immigration mess, and cadaverous Trump aide Stephen Miller was called a “fascist” by a protester at a Mexican restaurant, this quickly triggered a farcical media debate about “civility.”