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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matt Taibbi
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April 3 - April 10, 2022
The only constant will be more and more authoritarian solutions.
The public largely misunderstands the “fake news”
Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most “lies” are errors of omission or emphasis.
I call these stories “four-sourced clovers,” because the number of unnamed sources claiming to bolster such questionable scoops has, humorously, grown over time.
when the Pentagon submitted its latest “where the hell we’re currently at war” summary—also known as a section 1264 report, which has to be delivered to Congress every six months
most socially exclusive professions in the country, noting:
By the mid-2000s, journalists at the top national papers almost all belonged to the same general cultural profile: liberal arts grads from top schools who lived in a few big cities on the east and west coasts.
What’s the Matter With Kansas? explained countless resentments built up among working-class voters over religion, education, economic inequities, and other issues.
In the eighties, these groups had wasted no time stepping in when Democrats, in a moment of insanity that has now stretched across decades, decided to punt away their working-class base:
What’s the Matter With Kansas? was a prescient portrait of a Democratic Party that was transforming into what Frank would later term a “party of the professional class”—urban, obsessed with its own smartness, worshipful of meritocracy and credentialing, and exquisitely vulnerable to accusations of elitism.
The original Populists of the 1890s were a left-based movement of farmers and the working poor. They had fiery rhetoric but fairly modest goals. They sought a graduated income tax and public railroads, and railed against the “money power” of the Northeast.
But presidential campaigns are not all about candidates. They’re more about the people who vote for candidates. Movements often precede their eventual leaders.
You can’t fix what you can’t see.
we’re trained to offer opinions even when we have no clue.
They knew what the perfect news consumer looked like because he was already reading the sports page.
News purveyors knew: if they could find a way to cover politics like sports, and get news consumers behaving like the emotional captives we call sports fans, cash would flow like a river.
the two most taboo lines in all media in America are I don’t know and I don’t care.
The flip side of cheering is hating, so part of that formula is hating everything about rival teams and fan bases.
“You’ve got someone who’s just telling you what you want to hear over and over,” he says. “That would be the most annoying person to hang out with.”
It’s just like sports. You pick a side and that’s your identity. There’s a lack of nuance. A lack of gray area.”
The phoniness, the constant hyping of conflict, the endless stroking of audience prejudices and expectations, these all started as staples of sports media.
These days, however, actual interplay between disagreeing guests is rare. Like sports channels, news outlets increasingly are more like cheering sections than debate forums. You get your side from your channel, while the other side gets its news on another channel.
we bombard you with headlines all day long, and increasingly present the news as a sports-like zero-sum battle between two sides, in which every day can only end with heartbreak or triumph for your belief system.
deep into a phenomenon that is closer to induced addiction or cult worship than mere marketing.
Content is designed not just to be lurid and sensational, but immediately disquieting from a psychological standpoint.
yellow headlines.
turn of the twentieth century, when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World battled William Randolph Hearst’s New
York Morning Journal for c...
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Like all religions, the arc of devotion can be bent with time. When belief flags, the tenets of the faith will become more and more extreme, the manipulations more aggressive, the promises more explicit.
A religion becomes a cult when it doesn’t allow the testing of its premises.
News consumers on both sides today behave like cultists, self-isolating intellectually, kept that way with a steady diet of terrifying stories about fellow citizens.
This deeply paranoid view of the human experience, telling all America it lives on a violent invisible influence battlefield, is the opposite of what the news used to be. The news was once a placid ritual designed to amp down the viewer’s political reflex.
Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent identified “five filters,” through which they said mass media operates. They were Ownership, Advertising, Sourcing, Flak, and an Organizing Religion.
Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.
It’s much easier to stall by keeping people obsessed with intramural/provincial arguments.
This ruse is inverse Chomsky. If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we’re now manufacturing discontent. It’s the only way to prevent a popular uprising.
If you want to be happier, if you want to live in a world that may be thick with problems but is at least a sunnier place where people are more decent to one another and more willing to cooperate and show kindness, just turn off the tube.
ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS stacked the deck even worse: in a two-week period before the invasion, the networks had just one American guest out of 267 who questioned the war, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Knight-Ridder newspaper chain.
Our readers aren’t here in Washington. They aren’t up in New York. They aren’t the people who send other people’s kids to war. They’re the people who get sent to war and we felt an obligation to them.
We should be professional jerks who examine every press release the way accountants look at numbers, i.e. as if each villainous digit potentially conceals lies.
The press was used as a laundry machine, tossing dirty information made “reputable” by attaching it to names of prestigious news agencies.
This trick, delivering information as unnamed sources and then later referring to reports as having been independently confirmed, made reporters part of the
When officials use the press to launder information either offered off the record or developed by foreigners, what they’re telling you is they want you to put your name on assertions they won’t touch themselves.
prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.
A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.
Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.
This is a major structural flaw of the new fully divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.
Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty.
something that would pass for corroborating evidence. The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in compromised public situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources.
