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

by Matt Taibbi

“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.