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

by Matt Taibbi

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...