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

by Matt Taibbi

By the election of 2016, virtually all the sports graphic ideas had been stolen. There were “countdown to kickoff” clocks for votes, “percent chance of victory” trackers, “our experts pick” charts, a “magic number” for delegate counts, and a hundred different graphic doodads helping us keep score in the game.

This nonsense has all had the effect of depoliticizing elections and turning them into blunt contests of tactics, fundraising, and rhetorical technique

By 2016 we’d raised a generation of viewers who had no conception of politics as an activity that might or should involve compromise.

We were training rooters instead of readers.

The uniqueness of the Daily Show, what made it funny, was that it ridiculed both parties.

Roger Ailes at Fox started this.

Ailes used to say: “The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.” Translation: you needed to pull hard the other way to achieve “balance” overall.

In late 2016, New York Times public editor Liz Spayd started to get lots of angry mail about “false balance.” Mainly, they were accusations that the Times over-covered Hillary Clinton’s emails and legitimized Clinton Foundation stories.

The Jim Rutenberg editorial calling for reporters in the Trump age to rethink old “norms of objectivity” was a significant step. He wrote his piece in August, right as Spayd was beginning to engage readers on the balance issue.

Rutenberg argued we should re-imagine “objectivity” in a way that would “stand up to history’s judgment.” This was basically code for accepting the argument about making political judgments about impact before running stories, even newsworthy ones.

The Times of course is not obligated to celebrate a Trump presidency, but this headline was a major stylistic departure. It was less reporting than audience signaling, a blunt list of demographics: “THE SANE AMONG US BRACE FOR TRUMP PRESIDENCY.

But Spayd’s point was not that having political views is bad, or that too many reporters are liberals. Rather, she was saying a reporter airing personal political views in public was unseemly, at least according to that’s paper’s venerable standards.

She noted we all have personal political beliefs, but “they ought to be personal,” and “when you sign up to be a journalist, that’s what you ought to be.”

I watched the Carlson interview of Spayd after colleagues insisted I click to “see how awful” she was. I did and was shocked. I thought reporters misunderstood. Spayd was taking a view that ten years ago would have been completely uncontroversia...

In the age before social media, most reporters didn’t have to expose their political opinions to the world. Today everyone is effectively an op-ed writer. Spayd’s take was, this isn’t necessarily a good idea, and exposes both reporters and papers like the Tim...

By “that value,” she meant the very old Times principle of reporters at least pretending to keep their own views separate from the topics they covered.

Not only did the Times end up firing Spayd, they eliminated her position. Even journalists of long experience cheered her dismissal in terms that were remarkably harsh. Gizmodo called her “incompetent,” the Daily Beast said she was “failed,” while Slate went with “failing.” Spayd, wrote Vox, was “so bad at her job that the elimination of her role might be seen as an improvement.”

Spayd was taking heat essentially for defending an approach that less than a year before had been industry standard: “objectivity.”

What this meant for journalism was a stress on inoffensiveness. Radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas, who at one point was the primary source of news for over 10 percent of the country, once said that his first radio sponsor, the Literary Digest, insisted that he report everything “down the middle.”

“Objectivity,” above all, was great protection for reporters. Having no obvious political bent was a prerequisite for taking on politicians.

“The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption.” This is more or less where we are now, and nobody seems to think this is bad or dysfunctional.

His Fox show was canceled in 2011 after he said Barack Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”

The financial bailouts had been an extraordinary betrayal of the population by the political class, which is why Trump scored when he painted Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton as creatures of Goldman Sachs.

Trump, like all great con artists, depended upon true details to sell lies.

All of this roughly coincided with Clinton saying in September that “half of Trump’s supporters” were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,” what she deemed a “basket of deplorables.”

It was one thing to apply the terms to Trump, who deserves all of these epithets and then some. But his voters? Did it really make sense to caricaturize sixty million people as racist, white nationalist traitor-Nazis?

But racism as the sole explanation for Trump’s rise was suspicious for a few reasons.

A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago.

The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college.

We don’t want you thinking about anything complicated: not non-voters, not war fatigue, not the collapse of the manufacturing sector, not Fed policy, none of that.

Trump pounded away at Clinton, and refused to take back even the most shameless behaviors.

After Trump won, though, another consensus formed. Liberal America had to be less polite.

Clinton said, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you care about.” She added, “Civility can start again” when Democrats re-take the White House.

bullshit investigation.” Watching all of this had me weirded out, among other things because I was infamous for my own use of bad language in print and had been trying for years to weed it out of my work. I thought: Now this is okay?

Civility got us nowhere. The uncivil Donald Trump won. Therefore, we must be uncivil to win.

Trump was uncivil, and did win, but about the last thing in the world any sane person would advise is following his example.

“Ballast Discharge Measure Won’t Protect Hawaii’s Coastal Waters”? Or: “11 Times Marie Hirono Had Zero Fucks to Give”?

Few think about this, but the press routinely puts the names and personal information of people arrested in newspapers, on TV, and, worst of all, online, where the stories live forever. Yet these people have not been convicted of crimes. They have merely been arrested or charged.

“So I’d tell my editor, ‘Hey, nothing happened.’ And he’d say, ‘Just find something.’ Because he can’t afford for there to be nothing.”

It’s why we love terrible people like Casey Anthony or O.J. as news subjects a lot more than we’d like someone who spends his or her days working in a pediatric oncology ward. Showing genuinely heroic or selfless people on TV would make most audiences feel inferior. Therefore, we don’t.

It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other folks we can deem freaks.

Agnew is one of the biggest disgraces in the history of American politics, a blowhard with no discernible ideas beyond the promiscuous use of every conceivable form of political corruption—yet in the American consciousness, he’s not a loser. He’s an aggressor.

The contravening kind of story was usually about the abject dumbness of Republicans. I actually won an award for such an effort, an article about Mike Huckabee called “My Favorite Nut Job.”

Pauli is right: politicians should be fair game. But the obsession with winners and losers runs so deep in the press that it has become the central value of the business.

When you look back at the generation of Heathers-style coverage, the evolution toward Trump starts to make sense. We can excuse almost anything in America except losing. And we love a freak show.

We count on your shame in the same way. We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform. But we assume you’ll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring over content specifically designed to reenforce your point of view. In fact, you’ll consume twice as much, rather than admit you don’t like to be challenged. Like Tolstoy’s weak hero, you’ll pay to hide your shame.

We can’t get you there unless you follow all the rules. Accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity. Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. Don’t challenge yourself. And during the commercials, do some shopping. Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer.

Limbaugh is a Syme. He helped invent the modern right wing, and intellectually is about as venomous as they come.

Alex Jones was the obvious next devolutionary step after Rush.

Sean Hannity is the better version of the template. He has no belief system, not even a negative one; he forms his opinions the way a cuttlefish changes colors, by unconsciously absorbing his professional surroundings. His ability to move from unquestioningly supporting George Bush to unquestioningly supporting Donald Trump (who hates Bush) is what makes him a superstar.