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

by Matt Taibbi

The kind of person who becomes a media institution, and spends retirement accepting awards and honorary doctorates, is the person who doesn’t have private thoughts or interests.

It’s not an accident that people like Dave Chappelle and Jon Stewart, when you do see them in public today, look like Gulag escapees—beards, glassy eyes, speaking in cryptic self-help aphorisms, seemingly desperate to get the fuck away somewhere.

In a nation of three hundred million people, the handful of men and women we pick to be our leading opinion merchants are almost universally terrible writers.

Friedman has no ideas that can’t be expressed in a catchphrase,” author David Plotz wrote, in a piece that was genuinely intended to be complimentary.

Humor is discouraged because humor is inherently iconoclastic and trains audiences to think even powerful people are ridiculous (or at least as ridiculous as everyone else, which of course is a taboo thought).

Within all of this is the solution to the oft-contemplated mystery of why columnists are never fired for being wrong. It’s not true—you can be fired for being wrong. You just can’t be fired for being wrong in concert. If you go back and look, you’ll find many of America’s highest-profile media figures are not only wrong very frequently, but absurdly so. Their saving grace is that the wrong things they express are the same wrong things everyone else is expressing.

The editorial opinions you’re exposed to most often are not individual points of view, but aggregated distil...

The most powerful example of this was the Iraq War (see The Scarlet Letter Club). But there are so many other examples.

From bombing Syria (remember Van Jones declaring that Trump “became president in that moment”?) to rolling back the already-weak Dodd-Frank bill, there are still huge areas of political overlap between even Trump Republicans and “mainstream” Democrats.

appropriations for either 2003 or 2004. The two-year increase of $165 billion eclipsed the peak of annual Iraq War spending and is also higher than the entire military budget for either China or Russia. Yet what was the story about the defense bill? “Trump signs defense bill, but snubs the senator the legislation is named after—John McCain,” was the Washington Post headline.

This story was picked up by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC, The Hill, CNN, CBS, the AP, and others. Cindy McCain even tweeted about it.

To recap: Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation.

For every hack on one side, there’s an opposite hack on the other side. One may be worse than the other, but their mirroring takes on big issues cumulatively create a consistent message.

The basic plot of Bias traces how Goldberg, who says he voted for McGovern twice and never voted Republican in his life, began over the years to be troubled by the liberal slant of his own CBS network.

Goldberg probably didn’t know it, or maybe he did, but he was doing the very thing he would later accuse “liberal media” of doing, i.e. cartoonizing the little guy.

But Enberg wasn’t making fun of little guys like Jerry Kelley. He was making fun of congenital billionaire Steve Forbes, one of the world’s biggest assholes, a lecturing nasal weirdo whose face is frozen in a creepy pinched-cheek smile, as if even the inside of his mouth was stuffed with dollars.

In the pre-Trump era, Forbes would have led every Top Talentless Rich Douchebags with the Temerity to Run For President listicle. His flat tax proposal was a transparent ploy to make the Jerry Kelleys of the world pay proportionally more tax, and the Steve Forbeses pay less.

Goldberg captures the fact that the news business is full of pompous jackasses. When Goldberg told his co-worker/boss Rather that he was going to write a Wall Street Journal editorial accusing the business of being slanted in a liberal direction, Rather exploded. “I’m getting viscerally angry about this,” he said, and proceeded to remind Goldberg that as a young man, he had enlisted in the Marines not once, but twice!

This story casts Dan Rather as the obnoxious “elite” and makes humble contractor Jerry “Doin’ the News” Kelley the working-class victim. But it’s all in service of selling the politics of the ultimate aristocrat, Steve Forbes, a man who probably didn’t blow his own nose until he was at least thirty. In that one unholy trinity you have the outlines of modern conservatism’s whole argument, which casts the press and Hollywood as “elites,” while their corporate overlords are kept off-camera.

The numbers there are actually pretty hard to ignore. Even the Washington Post recently ran stats showing only 7 percent of reporters currently identify as Republicans.

The news business is absolutely different in a class sense than it once was, particularly at the national level. These days it’s almost exclusively the preserve of graduates from expensive colleges, when it was once a job for working-class types who started as paper-kids or printers. And being graduates of universities, most people in the business start with a pretty uniform political worldview, at least from a partisan standpoint.

Goldberg is correct that the national press is a cultural and political bubble in this sense, and has been for a while.

What he leaves out is that all these college-educated Democrats work for giant bloodless corporations who dictate coverage on a much broader level that actually drifts to the extreme in a different direction.

Studies consistently show (and everyone in the business knows this) that you need to kill third-worlders in massive numbers to earn anything like the coverage we’d devote to one dead American, particularly an upper-class American.

One of the ugliest stats ever recorded about the press in this country that almost, but not quite, validates Goldberg’s thesis involves CNN coverage of Congo between 2004 and 2008. At the time, about fifty thousand Congolese a month were dying from war, genocide, and associated problems like disease. It’s one of the major humanitarian disasters of the last hundred years, rivaling World War II for deaths. But of the forty-four Africa segments on Anderson Cooper 360 during that four-year period, only sixteen did not involve either Angelina Jolie or the plight of gorillas.

We don’t cover child labor, debt slavery, human rights atrocities (particularly by U.S. client nations), white-collar crime, environmental crises involving nuclear or agricultural waste, military contracting corruption (the Pentagon by now cannot account for over six trillion dollars in spending), corporate tax evasion and dozens of other topics.

Goldberg’s “liberal bias” schtick was a significant development on the road to Trump. He took an ugly truth about the demographics of the news business and used it to make an argument that “the elites” are journalists, not their bosses or their advertisers.

Fox isn’t any better. (It’s actually about a hundred times worse, but give Goldberg credit for trying).

Bill O’Reilly being unable to even cop to Fox being a “conservative network” says pretty much everything you need to know about how deep the derangement, or maybe the cynical spin, is over there.

The flip side of the Bias con—why it works, despite its pretty transparent stupidity—is that most working journalists are too self-serious to admit the true part of it. We constantly validate right-wing caricatures of us as humorless upper-class snobs.

Most of the distrust of the media is found among conservatives. Statistician/poll guru Nate Silver, a onetime baseball stats nerd who has somehow become the High Data Mullah of All Things since he began writing about politics, summed it up in simple terms. “Republicans hate the media a lot, and Democrats hate the media a little.” 2. Those discontented Republican voters, the thinking goes, are really upset because they just can’t deal with reality. This is because, as comedian Stephen Colbert and enlightened press figures like Paul Krugman of the New York Times alike have been quick to point out, reality has “a well-known liberal bias.” 3. Therefore, ordinary people don’t really hate us. They just hate reality.

The awesome humor of a national news reporter needing to organize such an anthropological expedition to her own country to prove a connection to “real” people was clearly lost on Sullivan, but she at least tried. She came back with a number of conclusions.

In my experience conservatives hate reporters mainly because they see us as phonies.

More than that, though: as a writer, it’s always your fault when you fail to persuade someone, or you should always think it is. You may console yourself that some audiences are more difficult to reach than others, but if you’re in the communication business, failing to communicate is a problem you should take personally.

People hate the media because they’re too lazy to be informed is the reporting version of They Hate Us for Our Freedom.

a less overtly nasty version of The Peasants Are Revolting called “media illiteracy” began to be bandied about in academic and press-crit circles. Under this theory, hatred of the media arose out of the “confusion” of the digital age, in which people (read: dumb conservatives) had a hard time determining the validity of sources.

Part of the “media illiteracy” concept involves the idea that Fox is a giant evil misinformation platform designed to mislead uneducated people, which of course it is.

Where Trump once rode to electoral victory by appealing to existing anti-press sentiment, and by mocking campaign coverage conventions that had been decades in the making, he is now described as the head of a top-down hate movement.

Factual fiascoes like the WMD mess, the aforementioned Rather’s National Guard pieces, or my own employer Rolling Stone’s faceplant on the UVA rape case were sometimes mentioned as having contributed to loss-of-trust problems.

At very rare times, we considered that our insistence on covering events like Brett Favre’s retirement decision or the Casey Anthony trial like Watergate or a moon landing might perhaps impact the public’s ability to take us seriously. In my experience a reporter had to be in an advanced state of drunkenness before that one would come up.

Either the media is a liberal cult, as Goldberg insists, or audiences are as Sullivan describes them: hopeless ignoramuses who reject their duty to self-inform. Neither take is accurate. The press is first and foremost a business, as commercial as selling cheeseburgers or underpants. We sell content, and what we don’t sell is far more important than what we do.

There is a wide range of stories neither channel covers for other reasons, many of them involving the military or international financial institutions. But one story everyone can safely cover is how much we hate each other. There’s no institutional or commercial taboo that story violates.

That’s why 85 SENATORS, INCLUDING PROBABLY THE ONE YOU VOTED FOR, APPROVE OBSCENE $160 BILLION MILITARY INCREASE becomes “Trump snubs McCain during bill signing.”

Heilemann and Halperin were once an unfailing compass of American conventional wisdom. Whatever was true, they went the other way, and the national press usually followed.

They perfected the art of commenting upon their own invented political narratives, a practice that brilliantly allows reporters to write about writing about what they write about.

What made these two pioneers in the hate-media business was the way they fused simple laziness with demeaning caricatures. They enshrined the practice of describing voters as dumb putty in the hands of DC political strategists, and perfected the art of turning one made-up hot take into eighteen months of articles, i.e. ...

Sure, if you’re covering elections, you can investigate what politicians stand for. You can check who their financial backers are, and ask what that support might be buying, policy-wise. But that would be based on the assumption that audiences are best served knowing the real-...

In polls at the start of the 2000 race, voters felt Al Gore would do a better job on virtually every issue, from the economy to protecting Social Security to education to naming Supreme Court judges to managing health care costs. Bush was really struggling to find an issue to run on that year. Nobody remembers this, but Bush actually ran as a military pragmatist who would not use the army as global police! Condoleezza Rice at his Republican Convention that year said America’s armed services were “not the world’s 911.” Back then, it was Al Gore who was saying new world realities would demand “we confront threats before they spiral out of control.”

That’s right: this madness began as a publicity stunt by a beer company, looking to latch on to debate coverage as a way to score free PR. Reporters loved the innovative poll. The “beer test” became shorthand for something they’d struggled over the years to articulate.

Reporters love the beer test because it’s a way of making elections about something other than politics. It’s also a great way to make elections about us.