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.