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I’m reading Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matthew Taibbi, a contributing
editor for Rolling Stone who has covered political campaigns. If you’re not
familiar with Taibbi I’ll note that he would never be accused of being a right-winger!
In reading his essays and his book it’s clear Taibbi despises Fox News and Donald
Trump. However, unlike many of his new media brethren who have jettisoned
objectivity to push their politics, Taibbi seems to value being objective even
when it leads him to uncomfortable conclusions. While he excoriates Fox and
Trump he also turns his guns (although with markedly less harshness) on CNN and
MSNBC.
In the chapter titled How Reading The News Is Like Smoking, Taibbi
says the following.
The main difference between Fox and
MSNBC is their audiences are choosing different personal mythologies. Again:
this is a consumer choice. It’s not the truth, but a truth product.
People who watch Fox tend to be
older, white, and scared. They’re tuning in to be told they’re the last
holdouts in a disintegrating empire, Romans besieged by vandals.
…
People who watch MSNBC, meanwhile,
are tuning in to receive mega-doses of the world’s thinnest compliment, i.e.
that they’re morally superior to Donald Trump. The network lately has become a
one-note morality play with endless segments about Michael Flynn, Michael
Cohen, and Paul Manafort.
…
The coverage formula on both
channels is to scare the crap out of audiences, then offer them micro-doses of
safety and solidarity, which come when they see people onscreen sharing their
fears.
I’ve written before about Arnold Kling’s book The Three
Languages of Politics in which he identifies three primary languages in American
politics. Liberals tend to talk in terms of oppressors and the oppressed.
Conservatives fret about civilization succumbing to barbarism. And libertarians
see things in terms of individual freedom from coercion. Based on listening
carefully how liberals, conservatives and libertarians talk I think Kling’s
model is valid.
Taibbi’s description of Fox’s primary audience identifies
conservative’s fear of leftist barbarians undercutting the traditional foundations
of civilization, which reflects Kling’s language modal. While Taibbi doesn’t
discuss the views of MSNBC (or the other major news outlets) in the same terms
as Kling, I assume Taibbi would agree with many of the Trump haters I’ve met who
claim that Trump is a racist, misogynist and didn’t earn his wealth but who
obtained it by taking advantage of people. A common theme underlies these
charges: that Trump (and therefore his supporters) favor oppressing people
because of their race, gender or economic status.
Later Taibbi says:
I’ve run into trouble with friends
for suggesting Fox is not a pack of
lies. Sure, the network has an iffy relationship with the truth, but much of
its content is factually correct. It’s just highly, highly selective – and
predictable with respect to which facts it chooses to present.
Here I’d say the same thing could be said about CNN, MSNBC,
ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR. Taibbi gives them a pass, as if they don’t do exactly
the same thing he attributes to Fox. On the other hand, the first appendix in
Hate Inc., “Why Rachel Maddow Is On The Cover Of This Book,” explains why Taibbi
put Maddow’s photo on the cover with Sean Hannity. He concludes the appendix
with this comment about Maddow.
What she reads each night is not
the news. It’s Stars and Stripes for a
demographic, the same job that made Sean Hannity a star. Only she does it for a
different audience, Lonesome Rhodes
for the smart set. Even she must realize it can’t end well.
[Lonesome Rhodes was a character in a 1957 movie titled A
Face in the Crowd. Here is the Wikipedia summary of the plot: “The story centers
on a drifter named Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes who is discovered by the producer …
of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes ultimately
rises to great fame and influence on national television.”]
While I’m only halfway through Hate Inc. I’ve read enough to
be comfortable with recommending it to people on the left or the right. As
Taibbi says, the news organizations “keep people away from the complexities of
these issues, by creating distinct audiences of party zealots who drink in more
and more intense legends about one another. We started to turn the ongoing
narrative of the news into something like a religious contract, in which, in
which the idea was not just to make you mad, but to keep you mad, whipped up in
a state of devotional anger. Even in what conservatives would call the ‘liberal’
media, we used blunt signals to create audience solidarity. We started to
employ anti-intellectualism on a scale I’d never seen before, and it ran
through much of the available content.”
The only thing I’d add is that this anti-intellectualism
springs from shedding objectivity.
