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

by Matt Taibbi

Goldberg went on to recount an episode when the Murrah building was blown up in Oklahoma City while Rather was on vacation. Anchor Dan was summoned back to work, but in the meantime, someone had to do the news, and that someone happened to be Connie Chung. While 168 bodies were still sizzling, Rather showed up at CBS and was “so incensed that Connie was on air first” that he spent hours calling media buddies and ranting off the record about what a second-rate journalist Chung was. This is all basically Genesis 1:1 of the “liberal bias” religion. Goldberg tells a true story about the upper ranks of network news being full of people who run editorials disguised as news more or less constantly, and are, like Rather, often so far up their own asses that they’ll start screaming their regular-person credentials at you at the slightest hint of criticism. This story casts Dan Rather as the obnoxious “elite” and makes humble contractor Jerry “Doin’ the News” Kelley the working-class victim. But it’s all in service of selling the politics of the ultimate aristocrat, Steve Forbes, a man who probably didn’t blow his own nose until he was at least thirty. In that one unholy trinity you have the outlines of modern conservatism’s whole argument, which casts the press and Hollywood as “elites,” while their corporate overlords are kept off-camera.