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

by Matt Taibbi

The news, basically, is bait to lure you into a pen where you can be sold sneakers or bath soaps or prostatitis cures or whatever else studies say people of your age, gender, race, class, and political persuasion tend to buy. Imagine your Internet surfing habit as being like walking down a street. A man shouts: “Did you hear what those damned liberals did today? Come down this alley.” You hate liberals, so you go down the alley. On your way to the story, there’s a storefront selling mart carts and gold investments (there’s a crash coming—this billionaire even says so!). Maybe you buy the gold, maybe you don’t. But at the end of the alley, there’s a red-faced screamer telling a story that may even be true, about a college in Massachusetts where administrators took down a statue of John Adams because it made a Hispanic immigrant “uncomfortable.” Boy, does that make you pissed! They picked that story just for you to hear. It is like the parable of Kafka’s gatekeeper, guarding a door to the truth that was built just for you. Across the street, down the MSNBC alley, there’s an opposite story, and set of storefronts, built specifically for someone else to hear. People need to start understanding the news not as “the news,” but as just such an individualized consumer experience—anger just for you. This is not reporting.

As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become. This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent. First, we’re taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we’re all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought. Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest.

Your media experience is designed to nurture and protect your ego.

The Trump era has moved the whole political media into the WWE space, where most stories are just entries in our ongoing love/hate relationship with Trump. We ignore everything else, not just Trump’s subtler evils.

The news is an addictive product. Like cigarettes, this product can have a profound negative impact on your health. Almost without exception it will make you lonelier, more anxious, more distrustful of others, and more depressed.

In 2017, Facebook’s former VP for growth Chamath Palihapitiya said he was guilt-ridden over helping push a socially destructive product that fed off “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops.” Napster founder and fellow onetime Facebook executive Sean Parker said something similar, talking about the “little dopamine hit” that you get from likes and other rewards. It was, he said, an experience designed to exploit human “vulnerability.”

The human brain just isn’t designed to take in a whole world’s worth of disturbing news. Most of us have enough trouble with the more mundane problems of finding inner peace and securing happiness for our loved ones.

Often the panic came hand in hand with a ready legal solution. Tipper Gore’s “Parents Music Resource Center” freakout over heavy metal lyrics was an eighties re-hash of Mod-Rocker fear. The solution, thankfully, was tame: warning labels. The same craze today would likely result in a Heritage Foundation council working with iTunes to secretly remove morally threatening music.

We’re also training audiences to fear being caught not knowing, and to believe it’s shameful to be ignorant of news.

This without a doubt is a form of religious worship. It’s what was being parodied in the movie Network, in which an anchorman who loses his mind and begins telling the truth on air is swallowed up and turned into the biggest hit show in the country.

Social media has wildly enhanced the illusion that there’s no life outside news.

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.

None walked back the rest of the propaganda, which is why even as the case for invading Iraq fell apart, our presence in the Mideast expanded. While Judith Miller became a national punchline, the “continuing exertion of American influence” became conventional wisdom. 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). The WMD episode is remembered as a grotesque journalistic failure, one that led to disastrous war that spawned ISIS. But nobody’s sorry about the revolutionary new policies that error willed into being. They are specifically not regretful about helping create a continually expanding Fortress America with bases everywhere that topples regimes left and right, with or without congressional or UN approval.

When officials use the press to launder information either offered off the record or developed by foreigners, what they’re telling you is they want you to put your name on assertions they won’t touch themselves. It takes a special kind of sucker to want to be that person, but this, frankly, is why pundits and editors who make such screw-ups keep their jobs or get promoted. They’re not being paid to avoid factual errors. They’re being paid to push underlying narratives, and eat any errors that happen to be discovered along the way.

A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.

As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.

A Face in the Crowd, the 1957 film by On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, tells a story of a drunken drifter named Larry Rhodes,

You can see what happened when something really became prominent that questioned the basic ideological framework. Like when Howard Zinn’s book… Taibbi: The People’s History of the United States. Chomsky: Right. When that became popular, historians just went berserk.

Taibbi: That was in the previous book? Chomsky: It was in the previous book, in the section on Vietnam. This was right at the time that the Argentine neo-Nazi regime was instituted, strongly supported by the United States. I had material on that, too, and a lot of other things, it covered a lot of ground.

the dynamics inside media companies: if you’re too independently-minded, if you have too obvious a bent toward independent thought, sooner or later, you’re going to run into trouble. You won’t be promoted, or you’ll get wrapped up in some kind of bureaucratic fiasco. Some kind of label will get attached to you, particularly in the giant daily news operations. Chomsky: They’ll say you’re too biased, emotional, too involved in things. But you see, it’s the same in the academic world. It just might be bigger words over here. Taibbi: There might just be a hair more intellectual mediocrity in our world than yours, I would think. Chomsky: Well, I’m not convinced of that.