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

by Matt Taibbi

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).