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

by Matt Taibbi

Trump turned the Washington Post and the New York Times into what the wrestling world calls “dirt sheets.”

Just on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox alone, Trump led a boom that saw a 167.4 percent rise in ad sales in 2016 compared to 2012.

The campaign press played the shocked commentator in perfect deadpan, in part because they were genuinely clueless about what they were doing. They never understood that the proper way to “cover” pro wrestling, if you’re being serious, is to not cover it. It is, after all, bullshit.

The longer Trump hung around in the race, the more the Wrestlemania audience began to take his side. They could see through the fake outrage in papers like the Post. After all, if you think the guy shouldn’t be making America think about Hillary Clinton getting “schlonged” by Barack Obama, don’t repeat it fifty thousand times.

Unfortunately, Trump ran into the one candidate capable of pinning herself.

When reporters after 2016 began bowing to reader pressure to “call Trump out,” they gladly entered the ring with him.

Trump’s early presidency turned into a heel/hero promotion, with Bob Mueller in the face role.

The problem with any coverage strategy based on a villains-versus-heroes storyline—and this has become a feature of both right-wing and “liberal” media—is that it boxes in editors. What if a character your paper has built up as a villain says something true, or does something righteous? What if one of your good guys turns heel? How do you admit the truth of that without puncturing audience expectations?

The percentage of stories including a Trump tweet was higher among “liberal” and “mixed” outlets (CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC counted as “mixed”) than the percentage in right-leaning outlets. You are more likely to read a Trump tweet in Politico, Vox, Slate, or on CNN than you are in Breitbart or the Daily Caller.

Real evil typically appears as institutional greed and inattention, and is depressing. People should never enjoy reading about the truly awful, and they don’t—which is why we spend less time on the water in Flint than body-language analyses of Ivanka Trump. You can’t “love to hate” the Flint water crisis. But you can love a good heel act.

The news is an addictive product. Like cigarettes, this product can have a profound negative impact on your health.

THE NEWS IS A CONSUMER PRODUCT

In 2017, Facebook’s former VP for growth Chamath Palihapitiya said he was guilt-ridden over helping push a socially destructive product that fed off “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops.”

The notion that you are reading the truth, and not consuming a product, is the first deception of commercial media.

YOU DON’T NEED TO WATCH THAT MUCH NEWS

WE ARE NOT INFORMING YOU. WE CAN’T, ACTUALLY

Except for one or two academics who volunteered time between classes, the only people who could understand the bill were paid lobbyists.

If we in the press were being honest with audiences, we would tell them: the world is so complex, you cannot ever hope to be truly informed. We can tell you a few broad strokes, but that’s it.

Bateman’s fellow moussed-banker pal Timothy Bryce challenges the table guests, saying, “What about the massacres in Sri Lanka…? I mean, do you know anything about Sri Lanka, about how, like, the Sikhs are killing tons of Israelis over there…?” This is basically everyone who reads the news. Most people don’t know anything about it, of course.

American Psycho was a book about how the American idea of personality is constructed around things we buy.

Ellis understood that most of us, when we read the news, are really just telling ourselves a story about who we like to think we are, when we look in the mirror.

The main difference between Fox and MSNBC is their audiences are choosing different personal mythologies. Again: this is a consumer choice. I...

Reporters are supposed to challenge their audiences. Did you buy one of the 110 billion non-biodegradable plastic bottles sold by Coca-Cola last year, and if so, would you like to see a picture of where it might have gone? Did the politician you voted for go back on his or her promises? Did your tax dollars pay for the bombing of women and children in foreign countries? Do you even know where we’re at war?

Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones (read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising). That’s why we don’t show poverty on TV unless we’re laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo) or chasing it in squad cars (Cops).

Openly taking sides gave Fox a consumer advantage. For certain viewers, it was more like a pep rally than journalism. No matter what happened, Fox was always going to have a predictable take, one it was unembarrassed by.

I’ve run into trouble with friends for suggesting Fox is not a pack of lies. Sure, the network has an iffy relationship with the truth, but much of its content is factually correct. It’s just highly, highly selective—and predictable with respect to which facts it chooses to present.

The worst of Fox’s excesses are editorial comments, like Sean Hannity saying Halloween teaches kids to beg for handouts, or Brian Kilmeade saying Americans “keep marrying other species and other ethnics” and “Swedes have pure genes,” or Glenn Beck saying of Obama, “this president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” It obviously denies scientific consensus on issues like climate change and has introduced some horrific deceptions into America’s belief systems, the birther controversy being the most notable.

The network is now a lot sloppier, factually, than it once was, having learned over time that its audiences don’t notice or mind screw-ups. The lesson of Fox in this sense should scare anyone who works anywhere in the business, because a lot of the Fox business model—if not its political content—is standard practice.

I work in this business and don’t know who to trust. The situation recalls the landscape of third-world counties, where the truth has to be pieced together from disparate bits reported by news outlets loyal to different oligarchical factions.

A 2016 Pew survey found remarkably similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans—58 percent of the former, 57 percent of the latter—said members of the opposing party made them “frustrated.”

Cohen found the most omnipresent descriptors were boredom and affluence. These descriptions played into belief systems of target audiences who were desperate to believe young people were simply lazy, drug-addled, spoiled monsters. In fact, the Mods and Rockers both were mostly undereducated and working class.

This set of circumstances led to something that another sociologist, Leslie Wilkins, deemed the “Deviancy Amplification Spiral.” This was an academic term for “using invented problems to drive people actually crazy.” It went something like this:

Often the panic came hand in hand with a ready legal solution. Tipper Gore’s “Parents Music Resource Center” freakout over heavy metal lyrics was an eighties re-hash of Mod-Rocker fear. The solution, thankfully, was tame: warning labels. The same craze today would likely result in a Heritage Foundation council working with iTunes to secretly remove morally threatening music.

Time writer Philip Elmer-Dewitt later wrote eloquently about being too young to realize he’d been duped. In retrospect, he wrote, the piece was the worst combination, i.e. good writing, bad facts:

Moral panics tended to have the most profound consequences for “folk devils” who were politically underrepresented. The War on Drugs has arguably been the most devastating ongoing panic of all, dating back to the unintentionally comic Reefer Madness.

A few sociologists over the years have noted that moral panics benefit the interested players in a particular way. There is symbiosis between big commercial news outlets and state authorities. Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the “folk devil” of the moment. A perfect partnership.

Smart people, however, understood that the instant this cash cow disappeared, the media business would change forever. No less an authority than Marshall McLuhan, in his famed book Understanding Media, wrote way back in 1964: The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold…

Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.

Until recently, crime has been the great example. Despite what the public believes, crime has been declining in America for nearly three decades. Because so much news programming depends upon beliefs to the contrary—to say nothing of politicians who depend upon scare tactics and “tough on crime” platforms to get into office—we rarely hear about this, thanks to a number of scams the press employs.

Going by the FBI, violent crime fell 49 percent between 1993 and 2017. By the BJS, violent crime fell 74 percent during the same period. But the public doesn’t believe it. There have been twenty-two Gallup surveys asking about violent crime since 1993. In eighteen of them, Americans believed crime was rising. Significantly, the numbers change if you ask people about crime in their neighborhoods, where most people see flat or declining dangers. Thus the typical belief system of an American media consumer is: crime may be down in my area, but it’s surely way up somewhere

The only brake on this kind of behavior in the past was the potential that another news outlet might call BS. This rarely happened, since even rival news agencies tended to collectively benefit from any scare. But the possibility at least existed. Today, in a politically cleaved media landscape, reporters know there is less danger than ever that their target audiences will be exposed to dispositive information. Rival publications do not reach rival audiences. MSNBC viewers do not read the Daily Caller and vice versa. Moral panics therefore rage on, essentially unchallenged, in every corner of the political universe.

One thing, however, seems certain. Seven thousand migrants was not an “invasion.” This would have been a minor, if depressing, story, were it not in the eye of a furious maelstrom surrounding the politics of Donald Trump. It might not have been reported at all in the Bush or Obama years.

Editors know Democratic audiences are devastated by the fact of the Trump presidency, so they constantly hint at any hope that he’ll be dragged away in handcuffs at any moment. This is despite the fact that reporters know the legal avenues for removal are extraordinarily unlikely. Such puffing of false hopes is the most emotionally predatory behavior that exists in journalism.

When special prosecutor Robert Mueller submitted in a filing that an Olympic weightlifter promised “political synergy” to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (an overture Cohen “did not follow up on,” according to Mueller himself), the press jumped. Here is Franklin Foer of Slate, who wrote some of the first Russiagate pieces: Cohen was talking “political synergy” with the Russians in November, 2015. November, 2015! That’s further back than most timelines of collusion usually begin.

So “a weightlifter” becomes “the Russians” instantaneously, and the minor fact of the communication never going anywhere is left out. Imagine if a “Putin lawyer” contacted Hulk Hogan and the Russian press reported “CONTACT WITH AMERICA!!!”

In the fall of 2017, the New York Times worked hand in hand with a collection of unnamed sources, congressional authorities, and self-interested think-tankers (who’ve been gobbling up grant money to study the new red threat) to create a devastating portrait of Russian subversion via Facebook ads.

Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.