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

by Matt Taibbi

You can’t smoke enough crack to make that sentence seem remotely true. Liberal bias is the “one topic” network news doesn’t cover? There are so many massive stories that the national press ignores on a daily basis. We don’t cover child labor, debt slavery, human rights atrocities (particularly by U.S. client nations), white-collar crime, environmental crises involving nuclear or agricultural waste, military contracting corruption (the Pentagon by now cannot account for over six trillion dollars in spending), corporate tax evasion and dozens of other topics. How about process stories? Does the average American know how the World Bank operates? Have audiences heard terms like “structural adjustment”? Who out there knows what the Overseas Private Investment Corporation is? How central banks work? How a bill gets passed through Congress? How and where military forces are deployed? Does the average American know we have special forces deployed in 149 nations right now (that’s 75 percent of the world, and that the number has expanded in the Trump years)? That we have ongoing combat operations in eight nations? These sweeping coverage omissions reflect the real biases of news companies. The so-called “liberals” at the infantry level of the business staffing the foxholes of day-to-day news broadcasts are rarely concerned with the important stories we’re not asked to cover, which are usually institutional and complex in nature. Goldberg’s “liberal bias” schtick was a significant de...