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

by Matt Taibbi

Trump violated every idea we had about what a presidential candidate looked, acted, and sounded like. He threw water, bragged about his dong size, ranted about women’s periods, and while doing so, didn’t check countless other key “electability” boxes. He had no “ground game,” a characteristic normally cited as a crucial factor. He was also an adulterer and ignorant of the Bible, running in a primary whose constituents supposedly treasured religion. By every conceivable standard of conventional wisdom, Trump had no shot. Even data journalists laughed at the notion that he could win.1 Nate Silver, the former baseball stats guru turned National Oracle™ (as Gizmodo called him), said Trump had a better shot of “cameoing in another Home Alone movie with Macaulay Culkin (or playing in the NBA Finals) than winning the Republican nomination.” But he won anyway. This should have proved “electability” was a crock, and killed it forever as a form of campaign analysis. It did not. It lives on, as journalism’s version of junk forensics. It’s like the infamous “comparative bullet-lead analysis,” a type of forensic science once used to link suspects to crime-scene bullets that turned out to be made up. Electability is the same kind of alchemy, about as scientific as chicken-bone divination, that nonetheless routinely impacts devastating real-world decisions. “Electability” often amounts to pundits saying that because a thing just happened once, it will never stop happening.