Once upon a time, 2020 wasn’t the #worstyearever. That distinct honor of annus horribilis went to 2016. I admit that in some personal life matters, 2016 was a memorably miserable year but sometimes I feel guilty of a twinge of nostalgia for that maligned year. Worst of all, I feel its pangs most acutely when thinking about the number one reason people still feel so traumatized four years later - namely, the election of Donald John "Tremendous Covfefe Twitter Kung Flu Thank You Kanye Very Cool Narcissist" Trump. This is not, I must make abundantly clear, an admission of supporting Trump, his agenda and his supporters. Quite the opposite, in fact. The reason I look back through the lenses of rose colored glasses is because of how engaged I felt in person and online working to oppose Trump’s uniquely insidious campaign. I can honestly say that I still feel good about the hours I put in volunteering in DC, Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, registering people to vote, calling strange phone numbers and knocking on random neighborhood doors to convince people to cast votes for the doomed Clinton campaign. I would be lying if I didn’t say I am sad about the approaching autumn season, not because apple picking and Halloween parties are almost certainly COVID-canceled, but because I won’t be able to political trick-or-treat (aka canvassing) as I have in the past.
Such in-person campaign efforts to avert the catastrophe of electing “Mr. Orange Man Bad” seemed incredibly meaningful at the time and still does four years later. At one point in time, I might have felt proud about all the breathless Facebook posts I published and news links I shared multiple times a day during the campaign excoriating Trump, warning of the threat he posed to some of our most cherished ideals as Americans. While there’s nothing wrong per se about using social media to vent one’s political grievances, with time I’ve cooled about such practices, not just because of the very clear negative effects that the nexus of politics and social media has on mental health, but because I realized that such posts directed to my curated friends list of primarily coastal, elite educated liberals serve little purpose apart from creating an echo chamber of ideas.
In the years since 2016, I have not just tried to wean myself off political posts on social media, I’ve been attempting to rise above the ever present temptation to live life viewing everything through the lens of some political ideology. Such endeavors are still, shall we say, aspirational, especially when the very act of wearing a face mask during a bona fide respiratory pandemic has somehow become a form of lefty virtue signaling (not a month ago, I was walking through liberal Brookline, MA and had a man on a bike inform me that I was “fucking brainwashed”).
If you, like myself, are someone who is at least a little troubled by the hyper-politicization of everything, you likely have some hypotheses about the root cause of this phenomenon. More than likely, one of those hypotheses will involve the toxicity of the modern news media. Rolling Stone editor (and therefore, “media insider”) Matt Taibbi’s new book Hate Inc. Why Today’s Media Makes us Despise One Another corroborates those suspicions and lays out an argument for why we all need to follow the “news” a little less religiously if we hope to save our political discourse from its current trajectory of zero sum brinkmanship.
Taibbi wrote the book with the intention of bringing Noam Chomsky’s famous work Manufacturing Consent into the 21st Century. Manufacturing Consent, published in the very different media landscape of the 1980s argued that the powers that be in the media largely restricted the scope of acceptable stories and viewpoints allowed on TV and in print. Chomsky argued that the media created the illusion of debate while never actually giving voice to anyone who might challenge the organizing principle of anti-Communism. You would never find democratic socialists, anarchists and other heterodox viewpoints on the three major networks or in the op-ed pages of the Times and Washington Post. Such people might give the talking heads a substantive debate, which was absolutely frowned upon. This process of manufacturing consent created a media environment so utterly bland and uncontroversial, seeking above all to create a broad consensus, that it could achieve maximal compliance for political and business interests.
Three decades later, in an era of cable news, right wing talk radio and Twitter, Chomsky’s framework no longer applies so well. Instead, Taibbi argues that instead of one hegemonic media industry imposing limits upon debate, we have two, one Republican, the other Democratic. Instead of seeking to create broad consensus, we are told to pick a side and conditioned to fear and hate the other as part of a cynical ploy to keep our eyes glued to our screens, enticing us to continue clicking, allowing valuable ad revenue and engagement data to roll in.
On the whole, Hate Inc. is as enjoyable as anything else Matt Taibbi has ever written, if not a tad repetitive and hodgepodge. This almost certainly owes itself to the fact the book originated as a collection of self-contained essays. Within this collection, there are some essays that feel more relevant to the overarching argument of Manufacturing Consent 2.0 than others. My eyes glazed over having to re-read the intricate details of the well known failings of journalists during the Iraq WMD and Russiagate debacles, important as they are at illustrating the media’s dangerous habit of pushing narratives backed less by facts than by the desires of officials in the intelligence community. However, I want to dissect in greater detail some of the more important lessons of the book (besides the very satisfying revelation from Taibbi that the people who make it to the top of the media industry are the ones least inclined with the traits of critical thinking and depth of expertise. In a couple of pages, Taibbi vindicated years of suspecting that people like David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Tucker Carlson are utter hacks. Taibbi even reminds us of Wolf Blitzer’s cringingly bad run on Celebrity Jeopardy as evidence to this assertion).
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Taibbi has some very insightful passages that can help us remember that “the news” is just another consumer product and one that is increasingly becoming more and more akin to the lucrative but tribal world of professional sports. He also rightly points out the dangerously insular socio-economic class that now dominates the journalistic profession that averts our gaze from issues of class. That being said, if you really need to take away one thing quickly from this book, I’d recommend reading his 10 Rules of Hate - the essential playbook of the modern media. Here I have summarized the 10 rules as follows:
1. There are only two ideas: Much like Chomsky’s observation in the 80s, the terms of discussion for most mainstream media sources are aligned with those of the establishment Republican and establishment Democratic parties. No heterodox voices may question the “received wisdom” of capitalism, consumerism, interventionism, etc.
2. The two ideas are in permanent conflict: The media propagates the illusion of freewheeling debate in spite of these excluded voices by raising the conflict between the two ideas up to an 11. These debates don’t actually comprise of much intellectual substance - they’re mainly opportunities for hacks to deploy rote talking points to score points on behalf of their most partisan supporters.
3. Hate people, not institutions - Simple enough - pin all the world’s problems on the peculiar malignancy of Donald Trump’s personality instead of examining the systemic issues in media, culture, education and the economy that made his political ascendency possible. If you’re on the other side, you have your own bug bears in the form of the crooked “Clinton Crime Family,” but not the desire to reflect on the institutional influences that allowed them to prosper in public life.
4. Everything is someone else’s fault - The news is more likely to publish stories where there is some easily identifiable individual to blame. It’s pretty easy for each side to find someone to blame for every story. Where Dems can pile on invective for Kavanaugh, Republicans can victimize Blasey Ford. Dems decry Trump for his policy of family separation at the border and Republicans retort that it was Obama who began that policy, actually. Everyone spends so much time blaming someone else that the actual issue at hand is made irrelevant.
5. Nothing is everyone’s fault - If an easily identifiable scapegoat cannot be found for a story, the news will likely not cover it to the same extent that they would if it could be attached to a personality. The media doesn’t go wall to wall coverage on investigations into the Pentagon’s budget, mass surveillance or our propping up of foreign dictators. These are bi-partisan, systemic failings and don’t make for easy piling on of one person.
6. Root don’t think - As previously stated, Taibbi documents the transformation of political news into a sport by another name. Anyone who has seen the mind-numbing political coverage of an election night on CNN knows this is true. Not just in the format of having a panel that pits a “Red Team” mouthpiece against a “Blue Team” shill in a gab battle. John King’s “magic wall,” weird charts to track every electoral metric and holograms...for some reason, all these advanced “data-driven” technologies originally had their origin in the world of sports broadcasting.
7. No switching teams - The partisan us vs. them mentality is no longer limited to cable news, however. Especially after the election of Donald Trump, expectations of objectivity for journalists in print media dissipated. No longer were journalists expected to cover troubling facts about someone on “their side” - to do so would lead to backlash from readers that they were guilty of “false balance.” Journalists became increasingly alienated from understanding the perspective of the other side of the political spectrum as the demands of the market required both liberal and conservative media to ignore critical self-reflection about the failings of their own side.
8. The other side is literally Hitler - Anyone who has spent five minutes on the internet knows about Godwin’s Law - the adage that holds "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." In the past two decades, the media has made Godwin the Law of the Land. George W. Bush was Hitler, then Obama, then Donald Trump. While there is room to note the shocking ascendency of white nationalist and other Nazi activity in the United States in the past few years, Taibbi merely wants to point out the dangerous fallacy in painting all the supporters of one of the two mainstream political projects beyond the pail of redemption. Our narratives about the other side need to be more nuanced than merely saying they are the modern day avatars of the most ruthless racialist regime of the 20th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
9. In the fight against Hitler, everything is permitted - Here Taibbi notes the debasement of political debate in recent years, especially on the liberal side. Once upon a time, liberal commentators had a reputation for being weak, easily steamrolled in debate by their more red blooded, rock ribbed conservative counterparts. Once again, the election of Trump changed everything and now we have a thriving liberal media industry that’s rude, crude and in your face. Civility is now poo-pooed upon and we’re left with epic, expletive laden takedowns of the other side that reinforce tribal loyalty and perpetuate an unwillingness to understand other perspectives.
10. Feel superior - News media has been infected with the same meanspirited schadenfreude that is most apparent in reality television. That is, just as people enjoy watching reality television because they can feel superior to the vapid dolts, drama queens, circus freaks, wildly deluded, etc. that appear as contestants on such shows, all of the above rules of hate have conditioned consumers of media to view news stories in terms of “winners” and “losers.” By stroking our egos and making us appear on the “winning” side, modern media keeps us hooked and coming back for more. Watching the news becomes just as much of an unchallenging guilty pleasure as watching rich housewives throw white wine on one another.
Taibbi concludes his list with a summation of the “perfect news consumer” that may as well serve as the ultimate warning for why we should all be more reflective of our media diets: “Accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity. Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. Don’t challenge yourself. And during commercials, do some shopping.”
Of course, I’m sure these are not the kind of things that you, an erudite reader of my blog would have to worry about. We don’t go for cheap shots at celebrity “losers” - especially ones who get their asses handed to them at a simple game of trivia - in order to make you feel better about yourself.
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But seriously Wolf, a five letter synonym for “CRASH” is not “CRASH.”
Note: All images are in the public domain unless otherwise noted.
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