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

by Matt Taibbi

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.