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

by Matt Taibbi

I began writing Hate Inc. at the outset of the Donald Trump years, after watching dramatic changes in journalism during the 2015-2016 presidential election campaign. At the time, the decision by mainstream media outlets to abandon longstanding “objective” approaches in favor of a more openly adversarial take on the Donald was pitched to us in the media business as an ethical decision, a necessity for a reporting corps that needed to “do better” to save democracy. I wasn’t sure that was what was really going on, bothered by the fact that the new strategies left our business superficially polarized in terms of politics, but more unified in terms of commercial approach. Stations like Fox and MSNBC now served as perfect strategic mirrors of one another. Both networks identified core audiences and fed them constant doses of affirming content. Essentially, news companies were commoditizing Trump, with Fox packaging simplified stories for Trump fans and stations like MSNBC packaging the same kind of content for #Resistance viewers. While smaller traditional newspapers were dying off by the thousand, old “objectivity” icons like The New York Times were moving to a new financial model that depended largely on recruiting and retaining digital subscribers—the Times would have six million by mid-2020— that incentivized a sports-like format of stoking fan bases. The press became rival cheering sections, and nuance disappeared as an unwanted product.

Whether the motivation was political or financial, the reality by late 2016 and early 2017 was that most commercial news organizations spoke exclusively to one “side” or another. The two-teams approach pushed Republicans and Democrats farther apart as they were less and less exposed to the same information.

By the time Trump came along, discipline was a fading memory. Trump was seldom in perfect sync either with traditional Republican media like Fox, or his own White House press office. Moments in which all three pushed the same message were rare as pearls. The disconnect between Trump and his official spoke-steam often played out like an intentional slapstick routine. For example, when Kayleigh McEnany said in July 2020 that Trump was tested multiple times per day for Covid-19, Trump himself was saying he was tested on average once every two days, and he “didn’t know” if he’d ever been tested more than once in a day. When Trump actually got the disease, both Trump and his doctor were proclaiming he was “doing very well” at the exact moment his press team was saying his health situation was “very concerning.” And so on.

As with porn, the customers didn’t show up for the scripts.

Stations like Fox improbably became sometimes-dissenters to the Hate Inc. formula during the Trump years, presenting points of view sure to disappoint core audiences. One of its top anchors, Chris Wallace, was a constant critic of Trump’s, and the station played a huge role in what Trumpists later denounced as conspiracy by calling the Arizona presidential vote early. In fact, it was Fox’s “early” call at 11:20 p.m. that triggered the first Trump tantrum that night. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, a much-loathed figure in blue America, was denounced in late November by Trump fans for pooh-poohing the stolen election tales, saying Trump attorney Sidney Powell had not provided evidence.

When Trump won, the distinctions between these outlets vanished almost overnight. Content increasingly was organized around furious opposition to Trump. The theme of unending crisis—not just crisis but emergency, a distinction expressed by news agencies via blaring chyrons screaming descriptors like BREAKING—was central to the new coverage concept. The hyper-intense tone was a deliberate strategy. A slow news day was understood as normalizing Trump’s presence in the White House. It was not politically possible for nothing to be terribly wrong, even for a moment. This had to be felt in the voices of news-readers, which meant fewer sunny asides, fewer cat-in-tree stories, fewer one-liner-laden tosses to weathermen, and—more crises.

News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything like there’s no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow? The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, misquotes, or rhetorical let-downs were memory-holed.

This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.

I’ve carried three books with me everywhere throughout my travels over the years (I’ve traveled a lot in my career as a reporter, living as far away as Mongolia and Uzbekistan). Those were Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, and Manufacturing Consent. Roughly speaking, the first book by Thompson is a great work of journalism, the second, Scoop, is the perfect parody of journalism, and Manufacturing Consent is an academic warning to reporters like myself, describing all the ways in which journalism can be counterproductive, serve power, and generally fail.

We started to turn the ongoing narrative of the news into something like a religious contract, in which the idea was not just to make you mad, but to keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger. Even in what conservatives would call the “liberal” media, we used blunt signals to create audience solidarity. We started to employ anti-intellectualism on a scale I’d never seen before, and it ran through much of the available content.

The subject here is the phasing out of independent journalism, replacing it with deeply politicized programming on both “sides.” Which “side” is better is immaterial: neither approach is journalism.

The key to this deception is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda is absent. Manufacturing Consent explains that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.

American news companies at the time didn’t (and still don’t) forbid the writing of unpatriotic stories. There are no editors who come blundering in, red pen in hand, wiping out politically dangerous reports, in the clumsy manner of Soviet Commissars. Instead, in a process that is almost 100 percent unconscious, news companies simply avoid promoting dissenting voices. People who are questioners by nature, prodders, pains in the ass—all good qualities in reporting, incidentally—get weeded out by bosses, especially in the bigger companies. Advancement is meanwhile strongly encouraged among the credulous, the intellectually unadventurous, and the obedient.

A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.

People need to start understanding the news not as “the news,” but as just such an individualized consumer experience—anger just for you.

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. Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both.

An oft-cited Gallup poll taken just after the 2016 election showed just 20 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers. An 80 percent no-confidence vote would be cause for concern in most professions. Reporters, however, have been unimpressed with the numbers.

Trump had beaten Ted Cruz, a politician who tried his damnedest to be as cruel and reactionary from a policy standpoint as Trump, but was out of his league when it came to manipulating sensationalist campaign media coverage. Cruz was routed in Indiana after Trump took the highly creative step of accusing Cruz’s father of helping assassinate John F. Kennedy. The correct response for Cruz in that media climate would probably have been to counter-accuse Trump of eating Christian babies, or maybe buggering Lenin’s corpse (the Democrats would later catch on and try a version of this). But Cruz didn’t get it and actually denied the JFK charges, which of course had the practical effect of just making us think about them more. “Garbage,” he told reporters. Worse, Cruz’s wife Heidi was asked by a Yahoo! reporter if her husband was the Zodiac Killer, a popular Internet meme at the time. She, too, made the mistake of answering in earnest, providing more headlines. “I’ve been married to him for 15 years and I know pretty well who he is, so it doesn’t bother me,” was her answer. I was at the miserable Cruz “victory” party in Indianapolis on the night of May 3, 2016, when the returns came in. A lot of reporters present were joking about Heidi’s answer. Many noted that it was a “non-denial denial” and “exactly what the wife of the real Zodiac would say” (this hot take later made it into a lot of real news reports, including, embarrassingly, my own).

When Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, Stephen Colbert invited him on the show—and had him drink beer and eat peanuts. “If you like boiled peanuts, it’ll certainly give you a leg up in South Carolina,” Colbert said. Yuk, yuk.

Two data points stood out after 2016. One involved those polls that showed confidence in the media dipping to all-time lows. The other involved unprecedented ratings. People believed us less, but watched us more.

Pick up any major newspaper, or turn on any network television news broadcast. The political orientation won’t matter. It could be Fox or MSNBC, the Washington Post or the Washington Times. You’ll find virtually every story checks certain boxes. Call them the ten rules of hate. After generations of doing the opposite, when unity and conformity were more profitable, now the primary product the news media sells is division.

So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.

The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.

1. THERE ARE ONLY TWO IDEAS There are only two baskets of allowable opinion: Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, left or right. This is drilled into us at a young age. By the time we hit college, most of us, roughly speaking, will have chosen the political identity we’ll stick with for the rest of our lives.

BAD THING HAPPENS Can it be blamed on one or the other party? YES (we do the story) NO (we don’t do the story—see rule #5)

And what about Donald Trump’s border policies separating families? Aren’t they inhumane, literally concentration camps? Concentration camps on our border? Yes, say some outlets. But Trump says it was Obama’s policy! No way, says Politifact, a fact-checking site preferred by liberal audiences. Well, sort of, says Obama’s former Homeland Security Chief Jeh Johnson, who went on Fox and “freely admitted” the Obama administration did jail families and separate children in what he called a “controversial” policy.

Trump’s “zero tolerance” gambit stands out because part of the intent of the policy seems to have been to dial up the inhumane aspects of enforcement bureaucracy to send a message. Moreover it comes from a president who’s used lines like “they’re bringing rapists” to rally anti-immigrant sentiment for political reasons. But it is true that immigrant children were routinely separated from their parents long before Trump. Moreover the entire enforcement system is, and long has been, draconian and inhumane in a way that would shock most non-immigrants. Also, it’s not as if this problem was entirely created by American border officials. The numbers are lower today, but we’ve had years where nearly seventy thousand unaccompanied children tried to cross the southern border. Is there a good way to handle that? Administrations of both parties have had differing levels of failure dealing with this, but it’s almost never looked good.

Glenn Beck would take Hannity’s Neville Chamberlain thread and run lap after lap with it, pioneering the “Your neighbor is literally Hitler” movement. Beck was awesome at this. Al Gore was Hitler. Obama was constantly Hitler. The National Endowment of the Arts was Hitler! (“It’s propaganda… you should look up the name ‘Goebbels.’”). ACORN was Hitler. The bailouts were Hitler (well, they actually were a little bit Hitler). Comedian Lewis Black had a hilarious Daily Show freakout when Beck compared even the Peace Corps to the SS! As Black put it, it was “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, except there’s just one degree, and Kevin Bacon is Hitler!” Beck was a mixed-metaphor enthusiast who was capable of calling a target both fascist and communist, Hitler and Stalin, in the same telecast. But his money gimmick was Hitler. It won him a huge audience, until it also ruined him. His Fox show was canceled in 2011 after he said Barack Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Within two years he was apologizing for being divisive—but still carrying around a napkin that supposedly contained Hitler’s bloodstains. There’s nowhere to go from Hitler. It’s a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at that point. If you go there, you’re now absolving your audiences of all moral restraint, because who wouldn’t kill Hitler?

Within all of this is the solution to the oft-contemplated mystery of why columnists are never fired for being wrong. It’s not true—you can be fired for being wrong. You just can’t be fired for being wrong in concert. If you go back and look, you’ll find many of America’s highest-profile media figures are not only wrong very frequently, but absurdly so. Their saving grace is that the wrong things they express are the same wrong things everyone else is expressing.

Goldberg captures the fact that the news business is full of pompous jackasses. When Goldberg told his co-worker/boss Rather that he was going to write a Wall Street Journal editorial accusing the business of being slanted in a liberal direction, Rather exploded. “I’m getting viscerally angry about this,” he said, and proceeded to remind Goldberg that as a young man, he had enlisted in the Marines not once, but twice! 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.

Goldberg, whose path to journalism was similar to my father’s—he went to Rutgers in the sixties—regularly comments on the upper-crust schools his colleagues favor. So, for instance, onetime CBS executive vice president Jon Klein is “an Ivy Leaguer, he went to Brown.” It’s regularly part of his quips about political hypocrisy. “They love affirmative action schools, as long as their own kids get into Ivy League schools,” he snaps. The news business is absolutely different in a class sense than it once was, particularly at the national level. These days it’s almost exclusively the preserve of graduates from expensive colleges, when it was once a job for working-class types who started as paper-kids or printers. And being graduates of universities, most people in the business start with a pretty uniform political worldview, at least from a partisan standpoint. Conservapedia cites this stat, culled from a George Washington University study: “The ratio of Yale faculty donations in the 2004 presidential election between Kerry and Bush was 150:3. The ratio at Princeton was 114:1, and at Harvard, 406:13.”

The story he tells about New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael disbelieving that McGovern could lose to Nixon because “I don’t know a single person who voted for him!” might as well have been about Trump, because the same dynamic is still true.

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.

Goldberg’s “liberal bias” schtick was a significant development on the road to Trump. He took an ugly truth about the demographics of the news business and used it to make an argument that “the elites” are journalists, not their bosses or their advertisers. Trump took this argument and ran with it on the trail in 2016. It’s been at the core of his rhetoric ever since. Ironically, Goldberg—far too late—tried to argue with Bill O’Reilly a few years ago that while “liberal media” bias may be a problem, Fox isn’t any better. (It’s actually about a hundred times worse, but give Goldberg credit for trying). “Liberal news organizations are going to play down liberal screw-ups,” he said, “but Fox News is gonna play down conservative screw-ups.”

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.

The big prize was the beer test. By 2004 the major news organizations were regularly commissioning this poll as a serious indicator. Bush walloped John Kerry that year in a Zogby re-hash of the Sam Adams quiz, winning with 57 percent of voters. A tradition was born. 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.

Additionally, 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.

This was particularly an issue with John Kerry. If you were a reporter following Kerry, you felt like you’d died and woken up in a vat of boiling grease. The man was pure distilled boredom. He had no clue why he was running for president. The only thing Kerry seemed to enjoy on the campaign was “orange baseball,” a game in which he’d roll an orange from the front section of his campaign plane down the aisle into the press section. The vets on the plane explained this was an old tradition (apparently Nancy Reagan was really into it as well). But Kerry bowled more oranges than any candidate they had ever seen. If we were taking off, Kerry would lean his huge head into the aisle, flash a dazed smile, and drop an orange on the carpet. As the plane accelerated upward, the fruit would fly down the aisle, gaining speed throughout, and smack the piles of camera equipment at the back of the plane, if it didn’t first bounce into the face of a sleeping reporter or bash an unsuspecting stewardess in the kitchen. Kerry would smile equally at each of these outcomes.

Silver, to his great credit, ultimately realized that “conventional wisdom” had infected polling. He warned about going too far in the other direction, but his basic take was that “polls may be catering to the conventional wisdom, and becoming worse as a result.” This was in 2017. He’d already had a dramatic change of view during the 2016 race. By the time the election rolled around, he was giving Trump a 29 percent chance of winning, which was higher than just about everyone else.

After 2012, for instance, Republicans were convinced they needed to soften on immigration to close the gap with Democrats. The RNC report on the loss of Mitt Romney laid out a whole series of reforms they thought would be necessary, including, “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” Then the few hundred people who actually matter in Washington will get their heads together and quietly decide which candidate is going to get the money for the next run. That candidate ends up with a few hundred million bucks and a head start with the press. This is how the Times described it in a different piece: The endorsements and donations garner mainly positive media attention for a candidate, and the candidate’s poll numbers then typically increase. These increases generate more positive media coverage, which in turn generates more endorsements and donations, and rivals are winnowed out of the competition. This is the so-called “invisible primary.”

You will never have the political power to do something about all the terrifying problems we wave at you. 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. We know this, but keep winding you up anyway. In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you’ll keep tuning in. The “You don’t actually need to be watching this all day” rule would be true even if news stories were sorted logically and according to social importance. They aren’t: WE ARE NOT INFORMING YOU. WE CAN’T, ACTUALLY Irony alert: the most important news story in the world is the inability of the ordinary news consumer to understand the news.

There’s a widespread belief now that “bravery”1 in a reporter is someone like Jim Acosta asking tough questions of someone like Donald Trump. But Acosta’s viewers hate Donald Trump. Wake me up when he takes on his own Twitter followers, or gets in his boss Jeff Zucker’s face about the massive profits they’ve all been making off Trumpmania.

Which brings us back to MSNBC. The network’s recent all-Russiagate format is indistinguishable from the pioneering way the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was monetized in the late nineties by MSNBC. People forget that MSNBC, before it found its current niche as an anti-Trump network, was just a conventionally crappy news organization. Launched in July of 1996, it had just a few hundred thousand households tuning in as 1998 approached. Then they made a decision to become, as former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard put it, the “first all-Monica, all the time network.” Keith Olbermann, then host of “The Big Show,” began running a nightly segment, “The White House in Crisis,” which spun Lewinsky stories virtually every night. Another MSNBC show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, extended its breathless format and began rebroadcasting at 11:00 p.m. during the Lewinsky period. All its top-rated shows were about the Clinton scandal.

If you’re a consumer of one media brand, the polls will tell you Trump is trending up: he’s five points ahead at the beginning of 2018. Pick another brand and you’ll learn only 38 percent of Americans plan to vote for him, and he’s in dire trouble. You can tell yourself any story you want about the future. During the heat of the Russiagate Panic, if you chose one brand, you’d read often about the “beginning of the end” of the Trump presidency. Pick another and you’d read there are basically no legal avenues for removing Trump prematurely that don’t involve a Republican Senate’s unexpected cooperation.

A 2016 Pew survey found remarkably similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans—58 percent of the former, 57 percent of the latter—said members of the opposing party made them “frustrated.” The survey showed 52 percent of Republicans believed Democrats were “closed-minded,” while 70 percent of Democrats felt that way about Republicans. We’re not encouraging people to break these patterns. If anything, we’re addicting people to conflict, vitriol, and feelings of superiority. It works. Companies know: fear and mistrust are even harder habits to break than smoking.

Not a reporter, Cohen nailed many of the techniques that make journalism work. Thanks to Christopher Nolan, pop audiences now know magicians rely upon a basic premise of a pledge, turn, and prestige, i.e. a promise to change something ordinary into the extraordinary. Show the audience a common top hat, pull a rabbit out of it.

Newspapers inevitably use FBI stats, which use varying methodologies and somehow always come out a little scarier. Going by the FBI, violent crime fell 49 percent between 1993 and 2017. By the BJS, violent crime fell 74 percent during the same period. But the public doesn’t believe it. There have been twenty-two Gallup surveys asking about violent crime since 1993. In eighteen of them, Americans believed crime was rising. Significantly, the numbers change if you ask people about crime in their neighborhoods, where most people see flat or declining dangers. Thus the typical belief system of an American media consumer is: crime may be down in my area, but it’s surely way up somewhere else. It’s easy to play with numbers.

NUMBER OF KILLINGS SOARS IN BIG CITIES ACROSS U.S., wrote the New York Times on July 18, 1990. Read carefully: Murder rates have increased steadily over the past several years. After reaching a peak of 10.2 killings per 100,000 population in 1980, the rate fell to 7.9 per 100,000 in 1984 and 1985, a decline that officials attribute to the drop in numbers of people in their teens and 20’s. The rate has since rebounded, reaching 8.4 in 1988, the last year for which the F.B.I. has figures broken down in that way. In other words, the Times in 1990 could have written the murder rate was down compared to 1980. But they chose to use the more recent swing upward as a hook. In the long run, of course, violent crime declined after 1990, and has overall since 1980. 1988 proved a high-water mark.

On Friday, January 18, 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the unusual step of releasing a statement essentially shooting down the latest “bomb-shell” in the Russiagate story, which had been released by BuzzFeed earlier that day. The BuzzFeed story said Donald Trump directed his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congress, which would potentially have been a felony. After the BuzzFeed piece broke, Democrats not only wasted no time calling for impeachment, but within hours began fundraising in response to the story.

The “senior Russian intelligence officials” story James Comey was forced to shoot down in 2017 had four unnamed sources. So did one suggesting Trump was about to fire the Fed chair. Luke Harding had two for his recent Guardian bombshell about Paul Manafort supposedly having met with Julian Assange (that story is still unconfirmed). Some of these stories begin with a single high-ranking intelligence official speaking to a reporter (or team of reporters) at an esteemed paper like the Times or the Washington Post. The reporters might ask for additional confirmation. The official may give them some names. The reporter(s) call the names. The names might belong to agency subordinates, or to retired officials now working at think tanks or private “research” agencies. Those sources confirm the initial story in its particulars. So you get four sources, or maybe six, but depending on the story type, it may really just be one story that’s been cycled through four friendly heads. It’s a game of telephone, with the reporter at the end. Incidentally: it’s a red flag if the call is coming from the official, as opposed to the reporter calling the officials. The average intelligence official wouldn’t stop to tell you if your child was on fire. When they start cold-calling agencies, and/or rotating scoops by doling them out to different outlets and papers each week, that’s a huge red flag.