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

by Matt Taibbi

Most officials have no mandate to protect a news outlet’s reputation. They’ll happily burn anyone and not lose a wink of sleep. They’ve been doing so for decades. TV channels and newspapers to them exist to be used politically. In some cases an official will develop a working relationship with a reporter who perhaps semi-knowingly transmits dicey, “trust us”–style information (this is similar to the way short-sellers have working relationships with financial reporters). But just as often, the news outlet is in the dark. They’re assuming a person with a government title won’t screw them, despite extensive evidence to the contrary. They always think: “This is different from My Lai, the missile gap, the Pentagon Papers, the ‘Soviets planned the papal assassination’ story, WMDs, the seventy-plus American backed foreign coups, and countless other incidents. In this era, my era, officials don’t lie.” Wrong. They lie constantly and always have, yet for some reason, we allow them to keep doing it.