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

by Matt Taibbi

So for instance, there was a pretty good chance the particulars of the story were correct when David Ignatius of the Washington Post printed the first “bombshell” about Michael Flynn having had phone calls with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. It’s an open secret in the business that Ignatius is a favored reporter of the CIA. God only knows who his source was on the Flynn story, but it sure was interesting that he ran a slobbering two-thousand-plus-word profile of departing CIA director John Brennan shortly afterward, somehow managing not to mention Brennan’s infamous episode of lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staffers.

The New York Times cited non-government sources in saying we hit al-Quso’s car on July 14, 2011 (he’s called al-Qusaa in their piece). One estimate places the total number of people killed in efforts to kill al-Quso at forty-eight. A non-profit in England took over a year to count just the publicly double-killed terrorists. The London-based Reprieve organization found that 1,147 people were killed by drones in efforts to kill just forty-one men. Twenty-four men were reported killed or targeted multiple times in Pakistan. Those attacks resulted in 874 people dead, including 142 children. Just in pursuit of Ayman al Zawahiri, we killed seventy-six children (he’s still alive).

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.

In the late 2000s, the British Cabinet Office issued a report called “Unleashing Aspirations.” It found journalism to be one of the most socially exclusive professions in the country, noting: • 98 percent of journalists born since 1970 were college-educated • Less than 10 percent came from working-class backgrounds • A journalist on average grew up in a family in the upper 25th percentile by wealth In America the change came in stages. When journalism became cool after All The President’s Men, upper-class kids suddenly wanted in. Previously a rich American kid wouldn’t have wiped his tuchus with a reporter.

By the 1990s and 2000s, the new model for political reporting was found in books like Primary Colors or Game Change, which celebrated politicians and their aides, and looked at things from their point of view. Leadership was hard! If a candidate had to fib or back off a campaign promise, the new generation of scribes explained a politician’s job was to accept the “burden of morally ambiguous compromise.” Reporters were forever trying to re-create the American Camelot. In each presidential race, any halfway decent-looking young Democrat was described as “Kennedyesque.” In 2004, both Democratic candidates, John Kerry and running mate John Edwards, won the moniker (the newspapers’ current Kennedy-to-be is Beto O’Rourke).

By the time Barack Obama ran for president, the transformation was complete. Obama, most everyone in the national press corps agreed, was our generation’s long-awaited Kennedy (German reporter Christoph von Marschall even wrote a book called Der schwarze Kennedy about Obama). Those who followed his campaign wanted to be passengers on his ride, “part of history.” I remember stepping on Obama’s campaign plane for the first time and seeing the press section plastered in photos. It looked like a high school yearbook office at the end of a semester. Apparently, there was a tradition of reporters taking pictures of themselves covering Obama. They often posed with the candidate, and pasted the pics on the plane walls. I liked Obama well enough at the time, but thought: “Man, this is not a good look.” A reporter who allows himself or herself to be photographed arm in arm with a politician is asking for trouble. If I did it, I knew, police would find a hundred bodies buried under the candidate’s lawn the next day.

What’s the Matter With Kansas? was a prescient portrait of a Democratic Party that was transforming into what Frank would later term a “party of the professional class”—urban, obsessed with its own smartness, worshipful of meritocracy and credentialing, and exquisitely vulnerable to accusations of elitism. The book was no cookie-cutter analysis. It wasn’t typical Republicans Suck/Democrats Suck marketing (drearily, there was one shelf for each in most bookstores back then). Frank came to painful conclusions, including many about his own party, and was unafraid to communicate them to readers. This to me was what journalism was supposed to be about, asking why things happen and being willing to be surprised or even upset by the answers. If Democrats could hear hard truths like the ones in What’s the Matter With Kansas? they were in good intellectual health.

The Clinton campaign claimed the small crowds were intentional. Reporters actually bought this. “We’ve gone into the less populous areas for a reason,” said Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri, insisting they were targeting key voters who just happened to live in sparsely populated regions. In the rare cases when mainstream American news outlets even mentioned the seeming lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic campaign, they dismissed it with bizarre tautologies. “Trump is trying to get massive crowds,” explained Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. “So no one should be surprised when he gets them.” Apparently Hillary Clinton wasn’t trying. So, no big deal. That Trump would later be ridiculed for his delusions about crowd size was beyond ironic, considering how much time those same press critics spent explaining away the enthusiasm gap in 2015–2016. There was another explanation out there for the enthusiasm problem, but no one wanted to hear it.

The sheer number of articles wondering if Trump’s win suggests there’s “too much democracy” these days conveys more about who is doing the analysis than it does about the political situation. Politicians and journalists alike have absolved themselves of any responsibility for what’s gone wrong, settling instead for endless finger-pointing at people who are irredeemably stupid and racist—who just “have bad souls,” as Frank puts it. This convenient catchall explanation makes the op-ed page the place where upscale readers go to be reassured they never have to change or examine past policy mistakes, even if it means continuing to lose elections.

(Wolf Blitzer doesn’t retain much, apparently. He finished with –$4,600 on Jeopardy. Asked for a five-letter word describing an “economic crash” he replied, “What is a crash?” In another category he was told in advance that the answer would contain three letter “E”s. His guess was “Annotated.” Wolf Blitzer reads a teleprompter. Don’t ever feel inferior to Wolf Blitzer.)

The paranoia about both national media and the opposing fans is now such a central part of the fan experience that for some modern fans, the dread of an opposing city reveling in their city’s loss outweighs the potential satisfaction of winning. There are Red Sox fans who’d prefer to not make the playoffs at all than lose to the Yankees there, and vice versa.

Most cable shows conduct pre-interviews. Typically, the show’s producer will call and toss out the same questions the host asks later. This is part educational exercise, in which the producer picks the guest’s brain in search of nuggets the show might want to explore. It’s also audition, designed to weed out inept performers. If you stammer in the face of a surprise question, you’ll be told at the last minute you’ve been bumped due to “time constraints” or some other transparent excuse. The primary motive for the pre-interview, though, is to make sure guests stay in character. In both sports and news media, the biggest crime is to break type.

If you turn on the TV and immediately feel like going to sleep, it generally means the political class feels secure. In the Soviet Union of the seventies, a person with the misfortune to turn on the television might be treated to pulse-pounding content like Rural Hour—or a tourism show like Explorer’s Club, which showed Soviet citizens the amazing destinations they could legally visit, like Kiev, or Kiev.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3 percent of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump that the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.” Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting that Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a president not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the thirty-seven indictments? The convictions? The Trump Tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and… Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse. For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute. The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so. The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election. The betrayal narrative was not reported as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing—crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the president was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.” Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the Trump campaign was “in on the deal” to help Russians with the leak. None of this has been retracted. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.

Still, who knew? It could be true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would need a lot of confirming. This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20, 2017, that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From Schiff’s opening statement: According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft… Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company. I was stunned watching this. It’s generally understood that members of Congress, like reporters, make an effort to vet at least their prepared remarks before making them public.

The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on February 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. The Times ran this quote high up: “This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.” About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they’ve told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign. “I can deny it,” he said. It soon after came out this wasn’t true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he’d had his “wires tapped.” Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of “incidental” surveillance. Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn’t know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely. Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.

Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route? This posture has all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan—the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying to Congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff—need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that “work”?

On the evening of Friday, March 22, 2019, when word leaked out that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had wrapped up his investigation and was heading home without recommending new charges, the eyes of the collective journalism world darted in Maddow’s direction. A massive machinery of ass-covering began whirring. Maddow was the industry name most intimately connected with collusion. She was practically the Madame DeFarge of Russiagate. In 2017 and 2018, The Rachel Maddow Show transformed into the Trump is a Russian Agent show, in which each night a new piece of the conspiracy would be stitched into view for audiences. This put her in some career jeopardy if Trump turned out not to be quite so guilty.

From there, the floodgates opened. “Commentary television is not news,” snapped David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, himself just days removed from saying on Democracy Now! that “I think [Trump] is a Russian agent.”

Jon Stewart raised the possibility of MSNBC turning into a Democratic Fox a long time ago, when he sat for an at-times uncomfortable interview by Maddow. He pressed her on the question of whether or not “it’s all tribal” and repeatedly pressed her on the central point of overlooking the flaws of one “side,” or even dividing the world into “sides” at all. The problem with the cable news “conflictonator,” he said, is “we’ve all bought into the idea that the conflict in the country is left and right, Republicans and Democrats.” He talked of a larger issue of “corruption vs. non-corruption, extremists vs. non-extremists” and pre-empted criticism that he was saying “you do exactly what Fox does, and you’re as bad as Fox,” noting that anyone who’d watched his show would recognize the “special place” Fox occupies in the hearts of Stewart’s Daily Show writers. But he turned the conversation around at Maddow, and said “false equivalence is something you do as well,” adding, “we have a tendency to grant amnesty to people we like, and overly demonize people we don’t.” He added that cable “amplifies a division that I don’t think is the right fight… [because] both sides have their way of shutting down debate.”