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

by Matt Taibbi

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. It takes a special kind of sucker to want to be that person, but this, frankly, is why pundits and editors who make such screw-ups keep their jobs or get promoted. They’re not being paid to avoid factual errors. They’re being paid to push underlying narratives, and eat any errors that happen to be discovered along the way.

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death blow for the reputation of the American news media.

Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base.

For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.

Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

Buzzfeed’s decision exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing material whose veracity you doubt. Although a few media ethicists wondered at it, this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith is still proud of his decision today. I think this was because many reporters believed the report was true.

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.

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.” About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

The letter by Attorney General William Barr quoting the Mueller report on collusion came out on a Sunday, March 24. By the next morning, Monday, March 25, the new conventional wisdom was that if mistakes were made, it was the fault of cable news, a small inconsequential island of suckage in a vast sea of responsible journalism. The turnover was so fast, editorials against her must have begun being written more or less at the moment the Barr letter landed.