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

by Matt Taibbi

We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors.

obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

They’re not selling news but an entertainment product, one that hooks audiences on rhetorical pace and conspiratorial energy.

The cable host is a ship captain, imploring audiences to pull oars. The aim is to drive narratives ever faster, faster, faster, toward a dot on the horizon that distantly represents undefined political triumph, a promised land for viewers.

Watch cable long enough, and the brain atrophies, and you’ll soon find yourself unable to handle unorthodox thoughts.

Gray areas don’t work on these shows. There is us and them and none of the show can be about questioning us.

“we have a tendency to grant amnesty to people we like, and overly demonize people we don’t.”

What makes this a critical part of the Hate media era is that one group is bound most of all by its collective disgust and disdain for the other.

We’ve built audiences who can’t handle contradictions, oddities, or subtleties. Everything is a clear fight between good and bad sides.

The Rachel Maddow Show and The Sean Hannity Show have become Crossfire for the new generation. In this updated version of fake political combat sold as theater, the pugilists never meet in the ring.

The essence of hate is fear. It’s the key lesson in To Kill a Mockingbird: we fear what we can’t see.

they’ve been trained to reject outside ideas as contaminants.

Chomsky answers, with a shrug, that, no, things have always been this crazy, just remember X and Y and Z…

The main idea in Manufacturing Consent is basically that idea: that it looks like we have a vigorous system of independent journalists, but the debate has been artificially narrowed.

silos of news, fed separately to each demographic.

Standard technique of the fake populists against the elites, while you’re actually working for them.