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

by Matt Taibbi

John Kenneth Galbraith, who invented the term “conventional wisdom,” stressed that the two most important qualities in the brand of non-thought he was describing were acceptability and predictability. Just as FBI profilers can guess the perpetrator of crimes by looking at victimology, you can reverse-engineer your way to popular op-ed stances just by looking at audiences and determining what points of view are most likely to please them. Writers like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and cohort David Brooks are perfect examples. Friedman, whose target audience is upscale New Yorkers and international businesspeople, has been writing the same “Capitalism, surprisingly, works!” column for thirty years. In 2002, Slate ran a story about why Friedman was the most important columnist in the world. “He’s effective not because he sounds like a historian, but because he sounds like an advertisement. Friedman has no ideas that can’t be expressed in a catchphrase,” author David Plotz wrote, in a piece that was genuinely intended to be complimentary. Brooks meanwhile wrote an entire book called Bobos in Paradise about how rich New Yorkers had achieved the apex of consumer taste. This was like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, except the Brooks version was The End of the History of Buying Tasteful Furniture.