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

by Matt Taibbi

We were never not encouraged to aim content at your outrage center. We were always eyeball-hunting.

I know this because I was hired to do this work, over and over.

Getting plaudits from liberal audiences for writing splenetic features about Mike Huckabee or Fred Thompson or Michelle Bachmann is like a comedian doing a routine in front of a bunch of potsmokers—you can’t tell if the laughs are real.

There was an undeniable gravitational pull toward the Red v. Blue narrative, and I wrote mainly for Blue audiences.

We started to turn the ongoing narrative of the news into something like a religious contract, in which the idea was not just to make you mad, but to keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger. Even in what conservatives would call the “liberal” media, we used blunt signals to create audience solidarity. We started to employ anti-intellectualism on a scale I’d never seen before, and it ran through much of the available content.

A generation ago, you would never have seen members of the media arguing for enhanced censorship powers and media regulation, as we’ve seen in the last year or so, in the controversy surrounding “fake news.”

The current party line on my side of the media wall is that “purists” helped elect Donald Trump by undercutting the campaign of Hillary Clinton, and such people are frowned upon as enemies and deviationists.

Most people don’t vote, which I’ve found is most often an expression of disgust or sarcastic indifference toward the range of political choices offered. I don’t go that far, but I do try to keep enough distance from politics to keep it in perspective.

Again, this attitude, which allowed me to write with enthusiasm about the candidacy of Barack Obama but critically of his failure to enforce laws governing Wall Street crime, was once considered proper and healthy for a journalist. Today, it doesn’t fit within either of the currently allowed categories of thought in commercial media.

In 2016 especially, news reporters began to consciously divide and radicalize audiences.

The cover was that we were merely “calling out” our divisive new president, Donald Trump. But from where I sat, the press was now working in collaboration with Trump, acting in his simplistic mirror image, creating a caricatured oppositional demographic and feeding it content. As Trump rode to the White House, we rode to massive profits. The only losers were the American people, who were now more steeped in hate than ever.

I have, of course, worried this book will not make sense to either of our two reigning brands of political partisan. Democrats may react with more anger than Republicans. The Appendix explaining Rachel Maddow’s presence on the cover may do little to alleviate this. Comparing MSNBC to Fox in any way will be deemed unforgivable.

The subject here is the phasing out of independent journalism, replacing it with deeply politicized programming on both “sides.” Which “side” is better is immaterial: neither approach is journalism.

Fox may have more noxious politics, but MSNBC has become the same kind of consumer product, a political safe space for viewers in iron...

Worse, today’s media debate has left its sense of humor behind, and we now argue even minor issues as life-or-death matters, despite not even knowing each other.

People who would certainly engage in courteous chats at their kids’ birthday parties freely trade horrific threats on Twitter. It’s insane.

For now, however, this is the form of Hate Inc., a book about a business that at its best informs us and makes us better citizens, but of late has become an instrument of tragedy, dividing us all and filling our lives with pessimism and mistrust. Fixing it will be difficult. But there are secrets to protecting yourself from it, and I hope you’ll find some of them here.

As a boy watching, I learned this lesson: sources are relationships that must be managed both when you’re doing a story, and also when you’re not. People need to feel like you’re interested in their lives for their own sake, not just when you need something from them. Also: ask people about whatever they want to talk about, not about one thing in particular.

There’s a lesson in this for modern journalists who’ve been raised to eschew talking in favor of searching for links (a type of “research” in which you’re really just confirming a point you’ve already decided to make).

My father taught me reporting is not just about talking, but being willing to be surprised by what people say.

The book’s central idea was that censorship in the United States was not overt, but covert. The stage-managing of public opinion was “normally not accomplished by crude intervention” but by the keeping of “dissent and inconvenient information” outside permitted mental parameters: “within bounds and at the margins.”

The key to this deception is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda is absent. Manufacturing Consent explains that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.

This careful sham is accomplished through the constant, arduous policing of a whole range of internal pressure points within the media business. It’s a subtle, highly idiosyncratic process that you...

Instead, in a process that is almost 100 percent unconscious, news companies simply avoid promoting dissenting voices.

Advancement is meanwhile strongly encouraged among the credulous, the intellectually unadventurous, and the obedient.

As I would later discover in my own career, there are a lot of C-minus brains in the journalism business. A kind of groupthink is developed that permeates the upper levels of media organizations, and they send unconscious signals down the ranks.

Chomsky and Herman described this policing mechanism using the term “flak.” Flak was defined as “negative responses to a media statement or program.”

A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.

An absurd legend that survives today is that CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, after a two-week trip to Vietnam in 1968, was key in undermining the war effort.

On the right, it is said that we should have kept fighting in Vietnam, in spite of those meddling commies in the media. The progressive take is that Cronkite was right, and we should have realized the war wasn’t “winnable” years earlier. Doing so would have saved countless American lives, this thinking goes.

A media that currently applauds itself for calling out the lies of Donald Trump (and they are lies) still uses shameful government-concocted euphemisms like “collateral damage.” Our new “Democracy Dies in Darkness” churlishness has yet to reach the Pentagon, and probably never will.

Moreover the development of social media would amplify the “flak” factor a thousandfold, accelerating conformity and groupthink in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1988.

Media companies used to seek out the broadest possible audiences. The dull third-person voice used in traditional major daily newspapers is not there for any moral or ethical reason, but because it was once believed that it most ably fulfilled the commercial aim of snatching as many readers/viewers as possible.

The prototypical Crossfire setup involved a bombastic winger like Pat Buchanan versus an effete liberal like New Republic editor Michael Kinsley. On some days the conservative would be allowed to win, on some days the liberal would score a victory. It looked like a real argument.

The job of Colmes was to get pinned over and over again, and he did it well. Meanwhile rightist anger merchants like Hannity and O’Reilly (and, on the radio, Rush Limbaugh) were rapidly hoovering up audiences that were frustrated, white, and often elderly. Fox chief Roger Ailes once boasted, “I created a network for people 55 to dead.” (Ailes is now dead himself.)

This was a new model for the media. Instead of targeting the broad mean, they were now narrowly hunting demographics.

Fox for a long time cornered the market on conservative viewers. Almost automatically, competitors like CNN and MSNBC became home to people who viewed themselves as liberals, beginning a sifting process that would later accelerate.

The New York Times deciding to cover the O.J. freak show full-time broke the seal on the open commercialization of dumb news that among other things led to a future where Donald Trump could be a viable presidential candidate.

an important principle in pre-Internet broadcasting is that nothing on the air, including the news, could be as intense or as creative as the commercials).

But once we started to be organized into demographic silos, the networks found another way to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict.

The Roger Ailes types captured the attention of the crazy right-wing uncle and got him watching one channel full of news tailored for him, filling the airwaves with stories, for instance, about immigration or minorities committing crimes. Different networks eventually rose to market themselves to the kid in the Che T-shirt. If you got them in different rooms watching different channels, you could get both viewers literally addicted to hating one another.

Whereas once the task was to report the facts as honestly as we could—down the middle of the “fairway” of acceptable thought, of course—the new task was mostly about making sure your viewer came back the next day.

The modern news consumer tuned into news that confirmed his or her prejudices about whatever or whoever the villain of the day happened to be: foreigners, minorities, terrorists, the Clintons, Republicans, even corporations.

How did this serve the needs of the elite interests that were once promoting unity? That wasn’t easy for me to see, in my first decades in the business. For a long time, I thought it was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman model. It looked like we were mostly selling pointless division.

The news media is in crisis. Polls show that a wide majority of the population no longer has confidence in the press. Chomsky himself despairs at this, noting in my discussion with him (at the end of this book) that Manufacturing Consent had the unintended consequence of convincing readers not to trust the media.

Papers like the New York Times, for the most part, do not traffic in outright deceptions.

As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.

Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest.

Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both.

We fumbled “Why do they hate us?” badly after 9/11, when us was guiltless America and they were Muslims in the corrupt Middle Eastern petro-states we supported.