Hate, Inc.

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. He has written the soon to be released book Hate, Inc., Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. He wrote an essay based on the book for The Washington Spectator titled How the Media’s 10 Rules of Hate Sow Discord and Make Us Despise One Another. The Spectator usually has 2 major essays and a few smaller ones in the eight pages of a monthly edition. In the July 2019 edition Taibbi’s essay takes over the entire eight pages.

In his introduction Taibbi reminds us that today’s major media companies are businesses that make money. They have found that they make more money when they train their audiences in hate. That extra money is more important to Fox News, the company that started down this path, than a civil society.

We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. … We’ve discovered we can sell hate, and the more vituperative the rhetoric, the better. This also serves larger political purposes.

So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.
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Hate is a great blinding mechanism. Once you’ve been in the business long enough, you become immersed in its nuances. If you can get people to accept a sequence of simple, powerful ideas, they’re yours forever.

On to the ten rules:

1. There are only two ideas. Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, left and right. All other ideas, such as Thoreau urging us to connect with nature or the sarcasm of Jonathan Swift, are ignored.

2. These two ideas are in permanent conflict. Which means the discussion is about the conflict, not about the policies.

3. Hate people, not institutions. Fox News struck gold in the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. But big media found no profit in doing big exposes on corporate corruption because, (1) big corporations tend to sue, and (2) the public didn’t seem to care.

4. Everything is someone else’s fault. Can the story be blamed on someone? It’s a win! For example, the condition of concentration camps for refugees at the southern border can be blamed on Obama. (Cue the old joke: I didn’t say you did it. I said I’m blaming you.)

The best news stories take issues and find a way to make readers think hard about them, especially inviting them to consider how they themselves contribute to the problem. You want people thinking, ‘I voted for what? Most problems are systemic, bipartisan, and bureaucratic, and most of us, by voting or not voting, paying taxes or not, own a little of most disasters.

But you never see that in the media.

5. Nothing is everyone’s fault.

The bloated military budget? Mass surveillance? American support for dictatorial regimes like the cannibalistic Mbasogo family in Equatorial Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia? Our culpability in proxy-nation atrocities in places like Yemen or Palestine? The drone assassination program? Rendition? Torture? The drug war? Absence of access to generic or reimported drugs?

Nah. We just don’t do these stories. At least, we don’t do them anywhere near the proportion to their social impact. They’re hard to sell. And the ability to market a story is everything.

And that marketing depends on how the story fits into the two party conflict. Nomi Prins wrote a book about the 2008 economic crash. But she doesn’t get much news airtime because, as one TV host put it, “I can’t tell if you’re progressive or conservative.”

6. Root, don’t think. Political shows are intentionally becoming more like sports shows. Elections are now discussed in sports metaphors, such as trackers for the “% chance of victory.” Because of that…

By 2016 we’d raised a generation of viewers who had no conception of politics as an activity that might or should involve compromise. Your team won or lost, and you felt devastated or vindicated accordingly. We were training rooters instead of readers. Since our own politicians are typically very disappointing, we particularly root for the other side to lose.

7. No switching teams.

Two years ago, unnerved by a lot of the same comments about “false balance,” I wrote: “The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption.”

This is more or less where we are now, and nobody seems to think this is bad or dysfunctional. This is despite the fact that in this format the average person will no longer even see – ever – derogatory reporting about his or her own “side.”

Being out of touch with what the other side is thinking is now no longer seen as a fault. It’s a requirement.

8. The other side is literally Hitler. Sean Hannity of Fox News began spewing that line after the 9/11 attacks. If liberals refused to accept the existence of terrorist evil, then they are also evil, and thus just like Hitler. But…

There’s nowhere to go from Hitler. It’s a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at this point. If you go there, you’re now absolving your audiences of all moral restraint, because who wouldn’t kill Hitler?

Taibbi then discusses the nasty guy. He’s Hitler? A case can be made. But what about his base? “Did it really make sense to caricature 60 million people as racist white nationalist traitor-Nazis?”

Here’s where I depart a bit from Taibbi and his excellent analysis. No, not all 60 million of those who voted for the nasty guy are racist. But he built his campaign on supremacy. It was also supremacy that trash talked Hillary Clinton so much that many voters couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her. Supremacy was essentially his only issue and has been his only issue while president. I maintain that his core supporters (which isn’t the entire 60 million – some of them regret their vote) love him because of his enforcement of the social hierarchy and the way he implies they’re with him at the top of the hierarchy.

Taibbi shows a great understanding of supremacy (including his next two points). But with this miss on nasty guy supporters I wonder if Taibbi understands how thoroughly the striving up the social hierarchy is entrenched in modern white male culutre.

Taibbi finishes this section with:

It’s a fight for all the marbles. Politics is about one side against another side, and only one take is allowed now – pure aggression.

9. In the fight against Hitler everything is permitted.

Meanness and vulgarity build political solidarity, but also audience solidarity. Breaking barriers together builds conspiratorial closeness. In the Trump age, it helps political and media objectives align.

The problem is, there’s no natural floor to this behavior. News and commentary programs will eventually escalate to boxing-style expletive-laden pre-fight tirades and open incitement of violence.

If either side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. What began as *America v. America* will eventually move to *Traitor v. Traitor*, and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.

10. Feel superior.

We’re mainly in the business of stroking audiences. We want them coming back. Anger is part of the rhetorical promise, but so are feelings of righteousness and superiority.
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We invented the “Wimp Factor” for George H. W. Bush and saddled Dan Quayle with the “bimbo” tag. This was propaganda, of course, as the idea was that politicians could only not be losers by bombing someone. But we were also telling audience that a loser was someone who didn’t attack.

Politicians should be fair game. But the obsession with winners and losers runs so deep in the press that it has become the central value of the business.

Taibbi concludes with:

The idea behind most political coverage is to get you to turn on the TV and within minutes have you tsk-tsking and saying, “What idiots!” And, from there, it’s a short hop to, “Fuck those commie-loving tree-huggers!” or “Fuck the Hitler-loving freaks!”

We can’t get you there unless you follow all the rules. 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 the commercials, do some shopping.

Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer.