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

by Matt Taibbi

Before long it was a media trope that civility was actually a regressive thing, a balm to fascism. Incivility was a requirement, a show of solidarity. “Fuck civility” was the Guardian’s take. “Trump officials don’t get to eat dinner in peace—not while kids are in cages.” Before long, it was typical for once-staid media figures and elected officials alike to swear like sea captains in public. Harper’s Bazaar didn’t just call Trump’s claims about Obama’s border policies wrong: they were “bullshit.” Even the headline read “bullshit”! In Harper’s Bazaar!

Democratic voters were nowhere after 2016 for a lot of reasons, and very few of them had anything to do with being insufficiently rude. Trump was uncivil, and did win, but about the last thing in the world any sane person would advise is following his example. During the race, I kept trying to imagine how someone like Martin Luther King would have responded to Trump. I don’t think the answer would have been, “We need to start saying fuck more.” Does Stephen Miller have the right to enjoy an enchilada in peace? I have no idea. Probably not. Is this a question of earth-shattering importance? Also probably not. The incivility movement is not about politics. It’s about money and audience.

Which headline is the Hawaiian Democrat going to click on first: “Ballast Discharge Measure Won’t Protect Hawaii’s Coastal Waters”? Or: “11 Times Marie Hirono Had Zero Fucks to Give”? Scatological blather scores shares and retweets, and now that there’s no ideological or commercial requirement to avoid pissing off the whole audience—no more “Good morning, everybody”—there’s no disincentive to using the strongest language.

Meanness and vulgarity build political solidarity, but also audience solidarity. Breaking barriers together builds conspiratorial closeness. In the Trump age, it helps political and media objectives align. The problem is, there’s no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable TV will eventually become seven hundred separate twenty-four-hour porn channels, news and commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style, expletive-laden, pre-fight tirades, and the open incitement of violence. If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. It would be illogical to argue anything else. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.

Few think about this, but the press routinely puts the names and personal information of people arrested in newspapers, on TV, and, worst of all, online, where the stories live forever. Yet these people have not been convicted of crimes. They have merely been arrested or charged.

“I wasn’t out there covering murders every single day,” Pauli recalls. “There just wasn’t a lot of crime. Maybe someone goes running down the street naked because they can’t afford their meds, or shoplifts from a Wal-Mart because they’re broke...” Sometimes, there would be nights when nothing at all would happen. “So I’d tell my editor, ‘Hey, nothing happened.’ And he’d say, ‘Just find something.’ Because he can’t afford for there to be nothing.”

we love terrible people like Casey Anthony or O.J. as news subjects a lot more than we’d like someone who spends his or her days working in a pediatric oncology ward. Showing genuinely heroic or selfless people on TV would make most audiences feel inferior. Therefore, we don’t. It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other folks we can deem freaks. Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?

Presidential campaign coverage as far back as the early 2000s was basically Heathers on an airplane. We developed lots of words for “loser,” and spent countless hours developing new methods of telling audiences which candidates were in that category. Dennis Kucinich, who was constantly ridiculed in the press plane for both his shortness and his earnestness, was dubbed the “lovable loser of the left.” The contravening kind of story was usually about the abject dumbness of Republicans. I actually won an award for such an effort, an article about Mike Huckabee called “My Favorite Nut Job.” Pauli is right: politicians should be fair game. But the obsession with winners and losers runs so deep in the press that it has become the central value of the business.

Trump sells the vicarious experience of being a “winner” compared to other schlubs. His lack of empathy is often cited as evidence of narcissistic sociopathy, and maybe it is, but it’s a chicken-and-egg question. Was he always like this? Or did he become more this way because among other weaknesses, he’s addicted to the worst kind of political media? When you look back at the generation of Heathers-style coverage, the evolution toward Trump starts to make sense. We can excuse almost anything in America except losing. And we love a freak show. Trump was the best of both worlds, as far as the press was concerned: an Agnew-style attacker on the one hand, and a lurid and disgusting monster-freak for audiences to look down on on the other. There is no better commercial situation for the American media than a president about whom a porn star can write, “I had sex with that, I’d say to myself. Eech.”

We count on your shame in the same way. We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform. But we assume you’ll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring over content specifically designed to reenforce your point of view. In fact, you’ll consume twice as much, rather than admit you don’t like to be challenged. Like Tolstoy’s weak hero, you’ll pay to hide your shame. It took a while for news reporters to figure out how to deliver the same superiority vibe you can get from reading local crime blotters or watching bearded-lady acts like Fear Factor, Who’s Your Daddy?, and The Swan. The idea behind most political coverage is to get you to turn on the TV and within minutes have you tsk-tsking and saying, “What idiots!” And, from there, it’s a short hop to, “Fuck those commie-loving tree-huggers!” or “Fuck the Hitler-loving freaks!” We can’t get you there unless you follow all the rules. Accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity. Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. Don’t challenge yourself. And during the commercials, do some shopping. Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer.

You’d trust the average newspaper editorialist to be able to assemble an IKEA product, but not much beyond that. If we were smarter, we’d be in another business, removing brain tumors, designing wind turbines, etc. Even the age of the intellectual poseur is vanishing. There are no more William Safires or Bill Buckleys who make sure to remind you every few weeks or so they like to read The Iliad and listen to Bach and expect you to know that Hilaire Belloc walked from Paris to Rome. The last of this breed is probably George Will of the Washington Post, who writes about baseball to convince intellectuals he’s ordinary and writes about Byron to convince ordinary people he’s intellectual. Will was once the patron saint of conservatives who felt a need to rationalize meanness as smartness. When Trump successfully ridiculed such people as phonies, Will lost his demographic niche. Now he has been forced to try to rebrand himself as a kind of Democrat, using the same goofball Dennis Miller-isms he once used as a GOP attack dog, only in reverse (Trump, he wrote more recently, is a “Vesuvius of mendacities”).

George Orwell wrote about in 1984. The book contains a character named Syme, a philologist coworker of protagonist Winston Smith. Winston is terrified of Syme, because Syme is smart, which means he’s capable of detecting Winston’s secret thoughtcrime. But Syme’s intelligence is of a particular, limited kind. He is fantastic at the job of dystopian propaganda, a master of the hideous intricacies of “Newspeak” and an ardent supporter of Big Brother: “In an intellectual way,” Orwell wrote, “he was venomously orthodox.” Unlike Winston, who spent his days terrified of being found out as a secret human, Syme radiated confidence. He believed deeply in The Party, so why would they ever snatch on him? But in Airstrip One, being too smart in any way was an offense. Syme, Winston knew, would sooner or later be vaporized. The crime would not be the wrong politics, but simply having too functional a brain. There’s an element of this with the press. The people in this business who are clever or original in any way—even in negative ways—almost always meet their comeuppances. They find themselves replaced by duller, meaner, more muddle-headed versions of themselves.

Thirty years from now, Hannity will be getting a tin medal from whomever is Reichsmarschall of the ex–United States by that point, which will identify him, not Rush, as “America’s anchorman.” The kind of person who becomes a media institution, and spends retirement accepting awards and honorary doctorates, is the person who doesn’t have private thoughts or interests. We want that person’s mind full of brand names and framed pictures with ex-presidents. We want the person who can confess to Parade magazine that Cinnabon fumes “have a hold over me like crack cocaine would over an addict” because “I’m blissfully in love with food courts” (that’s Brian Williams). It’s not an accident that people like Dave Chappelle and Jon Stewart, when you do see them in public today, look like Gulag escapees—beards, glassy eyes, speaking in cryptic self-help aphorisms, seemingly desperate to get the fuck away somewhere. Having a sense of humor or a conscience or both in a high-profile media job is a quick way to end up wandering New York or some distant farm, Vincent Gigante–style, in a bathrobe and stubble.

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.

Today, one almost looks back fondly at Nicholas Kristof and Rush Limbaugh beating the Iraq War drum together. Those were the days! At least the upper media ranks all agreed on something once, even if it was a murderous, unforgivable mistake. Such cuddly rhetorical cooperation between pseudo-left and genuine-right poles of commercial media seems impossible now, when the two camps of our ongoing cultural war don’t seem to intersect at all. Except they do. From bombing Syria (remember Van Jones declaring that Trump “became president in that moment”?) to rolling back the already-weak Dodd-Frank bill, there are still huge areas of political overlap between even Trump Republicans and “mainstream” Democrats.

The year one increase in Trump’s defense budget that passed with overwhelming Democratic cooperation—85–10 in the Senate—was $82 billion, higher than the Iraq War appropriations for either 2003 or 2004. The two-year increase of $165 billion eclipsed the peak of annual Iraq War spending and is also higher than the entire military budget for either China or Russia. Yet what was the story about the defense bill? “Trump signs defense bill, but snubs the senator the legislation is named after—John McCain,” was the Washington Post headline. This was before McCain’s death. The Post assigned three reporters to this story—three!—and ripped Trump for having “name-checked” four other members of Congress, but not McCain—whom Trump, they wrote, “frequently disparages.” They quoted a mortified John Kerry, who seethed: “Disgraceful.”

The schism is the conventional wisdom. Making the culture war the center of everyone’s universe is job one.

Take, for instance, the Why Do They Hate Us? question, about why the public mistrusts the press. The highest priest of the “Liberal Bias” question is Emmy-winning former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg crafted the modern conservative take on liberal media, beginning with a 1996 editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Networks Need a Reality Check.” Most of the modern tenets of the liberal-bias religion are found in that early editorial, which he elucidated at greater length with a subsequent smash-hit number one bestselling book, Bias. If one could surgically remove its obnoxious thesis, and re-cast it as a lurid tell-all about egomaniacal network TV personalities, Bias would actually be a funny book. With a few tweaks, you could re-write it as The Unbearable Full-of-Shitness of Dan Rather and you’d have the raw material for a great comic movie, or a long-running series in the Larry Sanders vein. Unfortunately, he went another way.

congenital billionaire Steve Forbes, one of the world’s biggest assholes, a lecturing nasal weirdo whose face is frozen in a creepy pinched-cheek smile, as if even the inside of his mouth was stuffed with dollars. In the pre-Trump era, Forbes would have led every Top Talentless Rich Douchebags with the Temerity to Run For President listicle. His flat tax proposal was a transparent ploy to make the Jerry Kelleys of the world pay proportionally more tax, and the Steve Forbeses pay less.

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.

Studies consistently show (and everyone in the business knows this) that you need to kill third-worlders in massive numbers to earn anything like the coverage we’d devote to one dead American, particularly an upper-class American. One of the ugliest stats ever recorded about the press in this country that almost, but not quite, validates Goldberg’s thesis involves CNN coverage of Congo between 2004 and 2008. At the time, about fifty thousand Congolese a month were dying from war, genocide, and associated problems like disease. It’s one of the major humanitarian disasters of the last hundred years, rivaling World War II for deaths. But of the forty-four Africa segments on Anderson Cooper 360 during that four-year period, only sixteen did not involve either Angelina Jolie or the plight of gorillas. Forget about lesbians in third-world counties—we don’t cover people in third-world countries period.

You can’t smoke enough crack to make that sentence seem remotely true. Liberal bias is the “one topic” network news doesn’t cover? There are so many massive stories that the national press ignores on a daily basis. We don’t cover child labor, debt slavery, human rights atrocities (particularly by U.S. client nations), white-collar crime, environmental crises involving nuclear or agricultural waste, military contracting corruption (the Pentagon by now cannot account for over six trillion dollars in spending), corporate tax evasion and dozens of other topics. How about process stories? Does the average American know how the World Bank operates? Have audiences heard terms like “structural adjustment”? Who out there knows what the Overseas Private Investment Corporation is? How central banks work? How a bill gets passed through Congress? How and where military forces are deployed? Does the average American know we have special forces deployed in 149 nations right now (that’s 75 percent of the world, and that the number has expanded in the Trump years)? That we have ongoing combat operations in eight nations? These sweeping coverage omissions reflect the real biases of news companies. The so-called “liberals” at the infantry level of the business staffing the foxholes of day-to-day news broadcasts are rarely concerned with the important stories we’re not asked to cover, which are usually institutional and complex in nature. Goldberg’s “liberal bias” schtick was a significant de...

People hate the media because they’re too lazy to be informed is the reporting version of They Hate Us for Our Freedom. It’s also standard within the industry, and really just an unfunny version of the classic Mel Brooks joke: Your excellency, the peasants are revolting! You said it, they stink on ice!

Part of the “media illiteracy” concept involves the idea that Fox is a giant evil misinformation platform designed to mislead uneducated people, which of course it is. But we run that story regularly, as though it’s a surprise. It’s gotten to the point where the Washington Post even does stories about how Fox broadcasts the statements of the president of the United States without correcting him. Why the fuck would they correct him? They’re not in the news business. They’re in the sell-ads-to-aging-anger-junkies-while-propagating-their-owner’s-right-wing-ideas business. The only reason not to point this out is that it might make audiences wonder about the business model of other TV stations.

Where Trump once rode to electoral victory by appealing to existing anti-press sentiment, and by mocking campaign coverage conventions that had been decades in the making, he is now described as the head of a top-down hate movement. He’s becoming the source of the Nile. Now none of this is our fault!

Since the 2016 election, though, “Why do they hate us?” has become absolutely linked to Trump for most reporters. Audiences have similarly hardened. More than ever, we’re stuck in a binary proposition. Either the media is a liberal cult, as Goldberg insists, or audiences are as Sullivan describes them: hopeless ignoramuses who reject their duty to self-inform. Neither take is accurate. The press is first and foremost a business, as commercial as selling cheeseburgers or underpants. We sell content, and what we don’t sell is far more important than what we do. If you want to scan the vast universe of things neither Fox nor CNN shows the public, just peruse “Project Censored” sometime. As in a sci-fi/dystopian movie, we only hear of certain crucial truths about our society when accidents happen—for instance, when a hurricane hits. Katrina forced urban poverty into view for a time. Hurricane Florence caused the New York Times and others to finally notice the toxic manure lagoons created by corporate pig farms that have long been health hazards.

There is a wide range of stories neither channel covers for other reasons, many of them involving the military or international financial institutions. But one story everyone can safely cover is how much we hate each other. There’s no institutional or commercial taboo that story violates. That’s why 85 SENATORS, INCLUDING PROBABLY THE ONE YOU VOTED FOR, APPROVE OBSCENE $160 BILLION MILITARY INCREASE becomes “Trump snubs McCain during bill signing.” In the modern press, agreement routinely becomes discord by the time you see it. We addict people to conflict stories so that our advertisers can remind them to indulge other addictions, like McDonald’s. It’s a perfect business model.

In polls at the start of the 2000 race, voters felt Al Gore would do a better job on virtually every issue, from the economy to protecting Social Security to education to naming Supreme Court judges to managing health care costs. Bush was really struggling to find an issue to run on that year. Nobody remembers this, but Bush actually ran as a military pragmatist who would not use the army as global police! Condoleezza Rice at his Republican Convention that year said America’s armed services were “not the world’s 911.” Back then, it was Al Gore who was saying new world realities would demand “we confront threats before they spiral out of control.” Whether he deserved to or not, there was every indication that Gore was going to win. Then, before the crucial third presidential debate, something happened. A beer company, Sam Adams, commissioned a poll: Which candidate would you rather sit down and have a beer with, Bush or Gore? By three points, 40–37 percent, Americans narrowly decided they’d rather have a beer with a recovering alcoholic than Al Gore. That’s right: this madness began as a publicity stunt by a beer company, looking to latch on to debate coverage as a way to score free PR. Reporters loved the innovative poll. The “beer test” became shorthand for something they’d struggled over the years to articulate.

Reporters love the beer test because it’s a way of making elections about something other than politics. It’s also a great way to make elections about us. No crowd of millions ever banged down the door of Time magazine and demanded, “We want a president who’s a good beer companion.” No, that idea came from a beer company, and reporters just happened to like it. It appealed to our caricatured idea of voters as brainless goons who can be trained to pick politicians using the same marketing techniques we use to sell soda or breakfast cereals. With tests like this, we never had to write about the policies.

Presidential debates are another pundit trick. They’re significantly decided by the reaction of TV talking heads, who play the role of boxing judges. In some cases, a debate will reveal something important about a candidate, like the time Gerald Ford appeared not to know countries like Romania and Yugoslavia were Soviet client states. In other cases, viewers will actually be more impressed by one candidate while watching the event. Then reporters run with an asinine post-game debriefing that changes the narrative. A classic example was 2000, when viewers thought Gore won until Republicans released a commercial with a loop of instances of Gore sighing while Bush spoke. This was off-camera behavior. Before Gore knew it, he was being asked by Katie Couric if sighing was “presidential behavior.” It became public legend that Gore lost the encounter (what does it mean to “lose” a debate, anyway? Isn’t it just information you’ll ponder in preparation for a larger choice you’ll make later on?). Gore would later express astonishment that the news media could change his fortunes within eighteen hours.

First-term Obama gave a massive blank check to corrupt Wall Street, expanded a revolting covert drone assassination program, and greatly widened the president’s powers of secrecy and classification, while prosecuting leakers (and even journalists) in record numbers. Halperin/Heilemann blew all of that off. In their prologue about the run-up to 2012, they barely mentioned Obama’s record. The one descriptive line about policy was, “Change had come slowly when it came at all.” Then they wrote a 386-page book about how Obama found his magic three-pointer just in time to get re-elected. The larger press corps followed this pattern. When Obama showed up for the second debate and was more “oxygenated” and “lacerating” and threw “punch, punch, another punch,” headlines pronounced him “reinvigorated” and back on the road to victory.

This is why it’s such a joke that Heilemann—the only one of the two who still has a career—now professes to be shocked, shocked that the White House is manned by someone who grabs women by the crotch and verbally assaults everyone within earshot. Trump embodies every quality these guys once celebrated: showmanship over substance, personal engagement over “explanation,” extreme aggression, and an obsession with “winning.”

Assholes like Heilemann and Halperin are part of the reason voters picked Trump in the first place. People got so tired of watching politicians do stupid pet tricks for gatekeeping snobs that they voted in huge numbers for the first politician with the nerve to flip the script, which absolutely happened in this case. Trump had these idiots riding around on a Zamboni, for God’s sake. Now, of course, after years of casting Obama as Rocky and telling voters to pick the guy with whom you’d rather have a beer, the Heilemanns of the world are draping themselves in solemnity. They’re denouncing voters for being dummies who refuse to take their civic duty seriously. And we wonder why people hate us?

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.

A truly interesting statistical observation about that year would have been more in line with what Chomsky said about that race. His take was that in a sample size that enormous, a tie would only be expected in one situation: if people were voting for something random, like the presidency of Mars. The amazing closeness of American elections has never made sense. In a country in which 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth, you’d expect the very rich to be a permanent electoral minority. That it doesn’t work out that way is odd. But this is not the kind of observation pundits tend to make. Instead, we peck around the surface.

Reporters built up a stack of these “laws of campaigning.” We became alchemists in big conical hats, sorting through giant tomes at the start of each race, to see if paths to victory for each candidate could be found in our mazes of rules. The trick was using polls to convince voters to interpret political news through someone else’s eyes, instead of their own brains. You may like the policies of candidate X better, but “polls say” (this use of the passive voice is key) you should vote candidate Y, if you want to win the election. But “Polls say” is often just “we say,” in disguise—in the same way a man-on-the-street quote is often just the first person found who agreed with a point the reporter wanted to make.

There were literally thousands of articles about Kerry and “electability” that year. Matt Bai of the New York Times later summed up 2004 as follows: “In this year’s campaign, electability became the issue itself.”

The whole “electability” question usually implies a) there’s a candidate in this field who’s most likely to win, and b) there’s a candidate who appeals to you on a policy level, and c) those candidates are not the same person. To this day people believe this is the case. Generations of voters have been trained to consider the politician who represents their views as unlikely to be “electable.” Most people are terrified of throwing their vote away, so they’ll steer clear of any candidate the press tells them has no chance. Particularly when the incumbent is odious, voters won’t vote their own interests and conscience. They actually think it’s their civic duty not to. The trick works best with political minority groups, who’ve been trained to vote according to how they’re told a larger plurality thinks. Until pretty recently, if you were nonwhite, female, single, childless, or gay, you were typically told you had to choose between a slew of straight white candidates who “polls said” had an actual chance. That dynamic is still true if you belong to any non-traditional political persuasion. If you’re an anarchist, a socialist, a “populist” (this term can mean almost anything), a nationalist, a Green, even a libertarian (the Ron Paul kind, not the Peter Thiel/Koch Brothers kind), you’ll hear that “polls say” people are not ready to elect your type of person. This effect is so powerful that it caused Barack Obama to underperform with black voters early in the 2008 race. Obama di...

Kucinich was the only candidate who treated college students like grownups and embraced idealistic policies like a Department of Peace. While other campaigns tried to win over “youth” by passing out T-shirts with cutesy names (“Deanie Babies” and “Liebermaniacs”) or giving away free hot dogs, Kucinich went the other way. At the University of New Hampshire in Durham, he refused to dumb down his speech and quoted the likes of Jung, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Thomas Berry, and the humanist sociologist Morris Berman. In a preview of issues that would become extremely popular among Democrats years later, he said his campaign was about changing the priorities of the country away from military spending and foreign intervention, and toward greater investment in education and health care. He sat down and opened up the floor to discussion, and the “stump speech” became a sit-in, where people talked about all sorts of things, including their personal lives, depression, drugs, etc. Kucinich ultimately got a standing ovation (as both he and Gephardt had at the AFL-CIO conference). Afterward, though, few students said they would even consider voting for him. “[Kucinich is] everything that I personally would want in a President,” a grad student named David Wilmes told me. “But… it’s going to have to be someone like Kerry or Edwards.” Why? “Well,” he said. “It’s probably going to have to be someone who’s tall.” I told Kucinich about this exchange. He sighed and said that until people learned t...

“Electability” was essentially conventional wisdom in search of scientific recognition. When fivethirtyeight.com appeared on the scene, campaign reporters—I heard this—felt their made-up takes were finally being sanctified by data. I remember, in particular, a debate about Sarah Palin in the later stages of the 2008 race. Reporters were torn. Palin seemed to be the candidate you’d rather have a beer with, but she was also clearly, you know, unfit for office, which bothered a lot of people covering her. How to square the contradiction? They’d normally be celebrating the “beer” candidate, but what to do now? Silver at that time wrote an article explaining that a vice president is by definition assuming office during a crisis. After all, the president has just died. Therefore, experience counts more than “vision.” In sports terms, you’d rather have the major-league ready player than the upside prospect. “I think Americans can feel sympathy for Sarah Palin, can believe she’s the sort of person they’d want to have a beer with,” he wrote, “and still find her a detriment to McCain’s case for the White House.”

The problem was that Silver’s predictions were based on a generation of voter behavior skewed by mountains of our goofball campaign reporting and idiotic conventional wisdom. Should voters ever tune us out, all that data would become meaningless overnight. This happened in 2016, when Silver outlined a Unified Field Theory of presidential campaign narratives. There were six stages of campaigning, he said, and each portended doom for Donald Trump. The stages were: Free For All, Heightened Scrutiny, Iowa and New Hampshire, Winnowing, Delegate Accumulation, and Endgame. Heading into the 2016 election, there were clues that the power of conventional wisdom was waning. A 2015 Pew survey, for instance, showed declining interest in “electability.” I personally was getting that sense less from polls, and more from the increasing frequency of being told to fuck off at campaign events, particularly Republican ones, i.e. the press was now being tuned out before we even asked questions, let alone before we told you who was and was not “electable.” The thing was, nobody in the press had any clue what would happen if people stopped listening to our “electability” horseshit. There was no data on this. We were about to find out. Trump demolished Silver’s “six stages.” He lost Iowa, and even underperforming media expectations there didn’t dent him. He accelerated during the “Winnowing” period. As Silver predicted, the Republican Party did indeed do everything it could to stop him in the “En...

The easiest way to predict what kinds of “electability” stories you’ll see in an election season is to look at the field of candidates and see which ones have a lot of lobbying and ad money behind them. Those candidates will be described as electable. Everyone else will get the “polls say” treatment. Be wary of our version of junk science.