In an earlier post
I commented on Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt
Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone who has covered political
campaigns. This article
from The Washington Spectator captures ten rules of hate that Taibbi discusses
in chapter 2 of his book. While I don’t agree with some of his observations or
claims I agree with his general points about how the news media wants us to
hate one another. Taibbi starts with “pick up any major newspaper, or turn on
any network television news broadcast. The political orientation won’t matter.
It could be Fox or MSNBC, The Washington Post or The Washington Times. You’ll
find virtually every story checks certain boxes.” What are these boxes?
Call them the 10 rules of hate.
After generations of doing the opposite, when unity and conformity were more
profitable, the primary product the news media now sells is division.
The problem we (in the media) all
have is the commercial structure of the business. To make money, we’ve had to
train audiences to consume news in a certain way. We need you anxious,
pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. Moreover we need you to bring a series of
assumptions every time you open a paper or turn on your phone, TV, or car
radio. Without them, most of what we produce will seem illogical and offensive.
While I think Taibbi has a valid point I also believe
another deeper factor drives this dismal lack of objectivity: postmodernism.
Per Encyclopedia
Britannica, postmodernism is “a late 20th-century movement characterized by
broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason;
and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining
political and economic power.” If objectivity doesn’t exist then news reporting
doesn’t need to be bound by a respect for the facts and the need to restrict
opinion to the editorials.
Nonetheless, Taibbi offers interesting conclusions based on
his first hand experience as a reporter.
1.
There are only two ideas
There are only two baskets of
allowable opinion: Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, left or
right. This is drilled into us at a young age.
2. The two ideas are in permanent
conflict
3. Hate people, not institutions
4. Everything is someone else’s
fault
Here’s how we create political news
content. Something happens, it doesn’t matter what. Donald Trump nominates
Brett Kavanaugh. A hurricane hits Puerto Rico. A massive humanitarian crisis
hits Syria. Whatever it is, our task is to turn it into content, quickly
running it through a flow chart:
BAD THING HAPPENS
Can it be blamed on one or the
other party?
YES (we do the story)
NO (we don’t do the story—see rule
#5)
5. Nothing is everyone’s fault
If both parties have an equal or
near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it. Or
better to say: a reporter or two might cover it, but it’s never picked up. It
doesn’t take over a news cycle, doesn’t become a thing.
6. Root, don’t think
By the early 2000s, TV stations had
learned to cover politics exactly as they covered sports, a proven profitable
format. The presidential election especially was reconfigured into a sports
coverage saga. It was perfect: 18 months of scheduled contests, a preseason
(straw polls), regular season (primaries), and playoffs (the general), stadium
events, a subgenre of data reporting (it’s not an accident that sabermetrics
guru—read baseball statistician—Nate Silver fit so seamlessly into political
coverage).
…
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 either 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.
In this business, everyone is on a
side, and we’re always fighting, never looking for common ground. It ruins
everyone’s suspension of disbelief if we do.
7. No switching teams
The concept of “balance,” which
used to be considered a virtue, has been twisted all the way around to mean a
taboo trade practice, a form of dishonesty. [HCS Note: I would prefer replace
the term “balance” with “objectivity.”]
8. The other side is literally
Hitler
…
There’s nowhere to go from Hitler.
It’s a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at that point. If you go there,
you’re now absolving your audiences of all moral restraint, because who
wouldn’t kill Hitler?
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 the other side is literally
Hitler, this eventually has to happen. What began as America vs. America will
eventually move to Traitor vs. 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.
It’s the same premise as reality
shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue,
but instead about terrible parents, morons, people willing to be filmed getting
ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other freaks.
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.
If you are a conservative or libertarian you probably will
disagree (as I do) with many of Taibbi’s examples because he aims his harshest
comments at Fox (Sean Hannity in particular) and Trump while giving the
mainstream (liberal) media relatively mild criticism. Nonetheless I’d say he
has captured valid problems with how the news media cook their political bias
into their stories.
As I said at the beginning Taibbi’s explanation that it’s
more profitable for the news media to inflame hatred than agreement and has turned
the news into a full contact sport misses the deeper cause. Postmodernism
flourishes in the “soft” spheres such as the arts and humanities which deal
with human based activities rather than the “hard” activities like the sciences
which deal directly with nonnegotiable reality. News reporting tries to make
sense of human actions and can be influenced by the biases and agendas of the
reporters, editors and managers.
I’m talking primarily about reporting in politics, not on
natural events like fires, floods, hurricanes, or murders and traffic accidents.
However, even in covering natural disasters the reporting can be colored by injecting
commentary on whether these events result from human-caused global warming. So
the basic reporting of the facts might be accurate but are shaped into a
narrative to support the belief that we cause climate change.
Nonetheless, I’ve found it helpful to read someone like
Taibbi who comes from a different political perspective than mine, who lives in
the world of news reporting, and has seen first hand how bias permeates this
world like the air we breathe. In my experience most of the consumers of this
“truth product” (Taibbi’s term) absorb this product without question. They assume
their news sources present the whole, unvarnished truth. If you question this
“conventional wisdom” they think you’re refusing to accept the obvious truth,
that your bias affects your conclusions. Meanwhile they believe they are exempt
from bias.
A friend of mine likes to say it’s a though many of us live inside
The Matrix, a fabricated world that fools us into thinking it’s reality. The
Wikipedia summary
of The Matrix seems particularly appropriate: “In The Matrix, the main
character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel
leader Morpheus. The red pill represented an uncertain future—it would free him
from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream world and allow him
to escape into the real world, but living the ‘truth of reality’ is harsher and
more difficult. On the other hand, the blue pill represented a beautiful
prison—it would lead him back to ignorance, living in confined comfort without
want or fear within the simulated reality of the Matrix. Neo chooses the red
pill.”
Keeping Taibbi’s rules of hate in mind can help free us from
The Matrix. If we take the red pill it means we need to work a bit harder to
think objectively – and independently – in the search for truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment