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.