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

by Matt Taibbi

Open up a New York Times op-ed page if you want to see the contours. The spectrum of ideas is narrow. There is no Paul Goodman preaching revolutionary pacifism. There’s no Thoreau, denouncing the spiritual bankruptcy of our work-centric lives, urging us to reconnect with nature. There are no Twains telling us that to “lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to ensure bad government.” There are no Bierces or Swifts helping us laugh at the rich and powerful and pompous. There is, however, always a Bret Stephens or a Ross Douthat representing the red side, along with the standard lineup of Paul Krugmans and Nick Kristofs repping the blue side. The Washington Post has George Will and Max Boot. “Intellectual diversity” in a major news outlet means “someone from both parties.” You will connect with one or the other. It doesn’t matter which one.

We don’t challenge audiences. I know one TV reporter who did a story about a murder in a poor region of the South. After the piece was cut, the news director ordered that interviews of chief characters be re-shot as standups by the reporter, a typically good-looking, well-dressed, educated northeasterner. The reason? Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones (read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising). That’s why we don’t show poverty on TV unless we’re laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo) or chasing it in squad cars (Cops).

We’re left to hunt other game. Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting. Until recently, crime has been the great example. Despite what the public believes, crime has been declining in America for nearly three decades. Because so much news programming depends upon beliefs to the contrary—to say nothing of politicians who depend upon scare tactics and “tough on crime” platforms to get into office—we rarely hear about this, thanks to a number of scams the press employs.

A religion becomes a cult when it doesn’t allow the testing of its premises.

It will be hard to keep concealed for long the obvious fact that turning off the news results in an instantly positive psychological change for most people. If you want to be happier, if you want to live in a world that may be thick with problems but is at least a sunnier place where people are more decent to one another and more willing to cooperate and show kindness, just turn off the tube.

Defense budgets exploded. NATO expanded. The concept of a “peace dividend” faded to the point where few remember it. We built and now maintain a vast global archipelago of secret prisons, routinely cross borders using drones in violation of international law, and today have military bases in eighty countries, to support active combat operations in at least seven nations (most Americans don’t even know which ones).