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

by Matt Taibbi

No major candidate that I could remember had talked about the donors being in the room during debates.

Trump will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he’s been selling, representing a workers’ party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike into starstruck courtiers.

It all worked. Were there other factors? Were racism and sexism huge themes that Trump exploited, perhaps more than any other? Of course. But he also explicitly ran against us, the flying backroom deal that was the campaign.

He ran against the unseen policing that for generations had carefully kept the presidency between mainstream Republican and mainstream Democratic poles.

We heard that taking speech money from banks was legitimate because politicians are people too and need to make money.

Moreover the same warnings we’d heard from people like Carville four years before about “complacency” were now absent. Carville himself came out in September 2016 and declared the race all but over, saying Republicans “continue to make a bad bet” on “non-college whites.” This was the same political consultant who’d put Bill Clinton in the White House targeting… non-college whites.

In the summer of 2016, I lost my nerve. I let pollsters talk me into the impossibility of a Trump win. Like a lot of journalists, I started ignoring what I was seeing at rallies. It was a huge, inexcusable mistake. Once Trump was president, I realized that I’d fallen for the con in my own business, which preached that all races a...

When it got caught clucking over how rich Trump was making them, big media was faced with a choice: cover him less, or find a way to justify covering him more. We chose door number two.

The papers will tell you this was an ethical/political choice. Perhaps it was, in some cases. But as much as anything else, it was a business decision.

Most outlets, whether they admitted it or not, basically chose to double down with half the news audience,...

In this new environment there would only be two acceptable takes in the press: pro-Trump and anti-Trump. Both takes would sell extremely well, in respective venues. But this formalized our descent into a sportslike coverage paradigm, which had been building for decades.

Two data points stood out after 2016. One involved those polls that showed confidence in the media dipping to all-time lows. The other involved unprecedented ratings. People believed us less, but watched us more.

We also sell content that’s just plain stupid, what that TV producer friend of mine calls the Isn’t This Weird? effect. But the easiest media product to make is called This Bad Thing That Just Happened Is Someone Else’s Fault. It has a virtually limitless market.

We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict.

The Herman/Chomsky thesis in the mid-1980s highlighted how the press “manufactured” public unity by making sure the population was only exposed to a narrow range of political ideas, stretching from Republican to Democrat (with the Democrat usually more like an Eisenhower Republican).

So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.

It boggles my mind that people think they’re practicing real political advocacy by watching major corporate TV, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN.

Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.

Journalist Jeff Cohen, who would end up cast in a later version of the show, and who wrote a terrific book about the experience called Cable News Confidential, described it this way: “The libs were like boxers who didn’t know how to punch.”

They’re about two things: reinforcing the notion that the world is split in half (what Cohen calls the “two and only two” message), and the spectacle of combat.

In his book, Cohen referenced an old joke: What do pro wrestling and the U.S. Senate have in common? Both are dominated by overweight white guys pretending to hurt each other. He said, “The intellectual level of cable news is one step above pro wrestling.”

This is one reason we have a WWE performer in the White House. It’s the ultimate synthesis of politics and entertainment,

Not many people can be neutral on the subject of Trump, so we wave him at you all day long. Meanwhile, a vast universe of systemic issues is ignored.

All three big-swing exposés ended in actual or threatened litigation, and disaster.

60 Minutes famously screwed over their source, Wigand, out of fear of being sued by tobacco firm Brown & Williamson, a moment that was an Alamo for press credibility. From that moment, sources could never be sure if they were making a deal with reporters, or reporters’ lawyers.

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman noted that in the aftermath of our loss in Vietnam, we regularly debated the morality of war journalism, but more rarely discussed the apparently less important subjects like invasion, occupation, bombing civilians, and so on.

Chiquita was a story about the very worst kind of corporate misbehavior, but in the cultural memory it’s become a story about dicey journalism.

In a headline years later, the New Yorker described the story as the “Chiquita Phone-Hacking Scandal,” as opposed to, say, the “Chiquita buys AK-47s for death squads” scandal.

Akre/Wilson were bluntly told by their new masters at Fox, “We paid $3 billion for this station, we’ll decide what the news is,” and were then fired. After losing wrongful termination and whistleblower suits when they protested being let go for doing their jobs, Akre and Wilson were counter-sued for damages. “We ended u...

In the years after Manufacturing Consent came out, big corporate conglomerates bought up most major media outlets. Station directors and publishers without reporting backgrounds suddenly became common. Now when you went to your boss to press for an important story, you were often talking to someone who looked back at you the way an auto executive might at an engineer pushing production of ...

The message to reporters working in big corporate news organizations was that long-form investigative reports targeting big commercial interests weren’t forbidden exactly, just not something your boss was likely to gush over.

“I don’t know if it was my case or just common sense, but there are some things you just know,” says Akre. “Like if you want to work in TV in Florida, you’re not going to do exposés on Disney.”

Akre, who was asked by her boss if she was sure a Monsanto exposé was the “hill” she wanted to “die on,” never worked in TV again.

It was after the Monsanto episode that Fox struck gold with the Lewinsky story and the Clinton impeachment. Roger Ailes, the new CEO who’d helped kill the Monsanto piece, was learning to cash in by terrifying elderly audiences with images of evil hippie power couple Bill and Hillary Clinton.

It would be a while before other networks embraced Fox-style open political slant (and when they did, they did it in a different way). But Ailes quickly had a lot of imitators when it came to the blame game, because:

BAD THING HAPPENS Can it be blamed on one or the other party? YES (we do the story) NO (we don’t do the story—see rule #5)

“Trump lied about 3,000 deaths in the Puerto Rico hurricane” is a story you can put in almost any big-city newspaper. If your audience is conservative, you can go with the flipped version, about how the media is out to screw the Donald: “No, it was Democrats who lied about the numbers!” And what about Donald Trump’s border policies separating families? Aren’t they inhumane, literally concentration camps? Concentration camps on our border? Yes, say some outlets. But Trump says it was Obama’s policy! No way, says Politifact, a fact-checking site preferred by liberal audiences. Well, sort of, says Obama’s former Homeland Security Chief Jeh Johnson, who went on Fox and “freely admitted” the Obama administration did jail families and separate children in what he called a “controversial” policy.

Immigration is a classic example of a story where blame for widespread misery and suffering is almost always diffuse and systemic, and very difficult to lay on any one politician or party.

Trump’s “zero tolerance” gambit stands out because part of the intent of the policy seems to have been to dial up the inhumane aspects of enforcement bureaucracy to send a message. Moreover it comes from a president who’s used lines like “they’re bringing rapists” to rally anti-immigrant sentiment for political reasons.

But it is true that immigrant children were routinely separated from their parents long before Trump. Moreover the entire enforcement system is, and long has been, draconian and inhumane in a way that would shock most non-immigrants.

Most problems are systemic, bipartisan, and bureaucratic, and most of us, by voting or not voting, paying taxes or not, own a little bit of most disasters.

If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it. Or better to say: a reporter or two might cover it, but it’s never picked up. It doesn’t take over a news cycle, doesn’t become a thing. The bloated military budget? Mass surveillance? American support for dictatorial regimes like the cannibalistic Mbasogo family in Equatorial Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia? Our culpability in proxy-nation atrocities in places like Yemen or Palestine? The drone assassination program? Rendition? Torture? The drug war? Absence of access to generic or reimported drugs?

“It is a purely bipartisan situation that things are as fucked up as they are,” laughs Prins.

The central banking policies have been supported by what we think of as the entire range of allowable political thought in America, i.e. from Bush-era Republicans who signed off on the original bank bailouts through the Obama Democrats who followed.

But TV bookers have struggled to figure out how to market Prins. She tells a story of a TV host who, in a troubled voice, quizzed her off air. “He was like, ‘I can’t tell if you’re progressive or conservative.’ And I thought, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“If it’s not either for or against Trump, you don’t get airtime,” Prins says. “You kind of have to pick one side.”

The notion of a crisis caused by a bipartisan confluence of powerful interests doesn’t fit into the way we cover news today.

It would be hard to do a story saying conservative higher-education profiteers like the DeVos family are gorging themselves on non-dischargeable, over-available federal student debt of the type congressional Democrats pushed for decades.

This might be the truth, but it cannot be marketed, because it doesn’t compute, not f...

TV news stations baldly copied visual “live variety” sports formats for coverage of primary elections, debates, election night, and soon enough, Sunday “discussion” shows like Meet the Press. If you’ve noticed, the sets bear an eerie resemblance to NFL pre-game shows. There’s a reason for that.