Matt Taibbi’s latest book is a no-holds-barred takedown of what the media have become in the era of Donald Trump. Taibbi, a longtime writer and now contributing editor for Rolling Stone, takes to task not only rightwing ideologues like Sean Hannity of Fox News, but also liberal media icons like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. And he does not spare himself, often using the pronoun “we” when talking about shortcomings. He occasionally confesses to having contributed to the problem directly.
Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi. OR Books, 304 pages, on sale October 9.
“We also sell content that’s just plain stupid,” he writes. “I know this because I’ve created a lot of that content.”
The book began as a “rethinking” of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the classic 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Taibbi argues that today’s media are “manufacturing discontent,” on both sides of the political aisle. “[T]he biggest change to Chomsky’s model is the discovery of a far superior ‘common enemy’ in modern media: each other . . . . Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.”
This transformation of the media into entities that generate division rather than consensus had its genesis in “behemoths like Fox” that “turned the old business model on its head,” moving away from “objective news” to news that was “opinionated, and nasty.” The new model took off with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Taibbi quotes the now-disgraced former chairman and chief executive officer of CBS Corporation, Les Moonves, who told an audience in February 2016 that Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Moonves went on to crow that “the money’s rolling in . . . this is going to be a very good year for us.”
According to Taibbi, this is a symptom of a much greater problem in the media. “We are trying to keep your brain locked in conflict,” he writes, “not just for the grubby commercial reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.”
“We are trying to keep your brain locked in conflict,” he writes, “not just for the grubby commercial reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.”
Hate Inc. draws deeply from Taibbi’s own years of reporting on various political campaigns. The son of TV journalist Mike Taibbi, he even goes so far as to argue, with regard to cable news, that people should “turn it off.” What happens if you stop following the news? he asks rhetorically. Nothing. “Not only can you live without us [the media], you probably should, most of the time anyway.”
I am not sure I agree. An informed public is the essence of a working democracy. We don’t need less news, we simply need more information. In the end, Taibbi’s analysis of the state of our media does not leave one feeling very hopeful.
United States of Distraction, a book released in August by Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff. Higdon is a professor of history at California State University in the Bay Area, and Huff, a professor of history at Diablo Valley College, is also the long-time director of media freedom organization Project Censored.
The pair also take on media in the time of Trump, but their approach is more structural (in many ways like the work of Chomsky and Herman). “For over four decades,” they note, “these bulwarks of democratic principles and practice have been bruised, battered, defunded, dismantled, diminished, infiltrated, and manipulated by corporate interests.”
As they see it,“The steady decline of education and independent media in the face of corporate power has created public vulnerabilities that have led us to the crisis we find ourselves in today.”
United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (And What We Can Do About It) by Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff. City Lights Publishers, 248 pages.
Higdon and Huff also see the hazard of division that Taibbi describes, but “[w]hen the press and our schools function properly, the citizenry can effectively participate in the democratic process.” In their book, the authors give the reader a road map of ways to counteract the negative effects of today’s media—including an extensive appendix of resources.
“Whether or not the people of this country allow authoritarianism, disinformation, and corporate control to be further normalized,” they write, “depends on what we, the American people, do to strengthen ourselves, our public-interest networks, and our democracy.”
By following Higdon and Huff’s prescription, it is possible that these bulwarks can be strengthened. They specifically recommend broader news framing, locally based investigative journalism, and educational news to “arm the population with the necessary forms of civic agency and self-defense to continue to maintain public sovereignty.”
It may be our only hope. “A better future is possible,” Higdon and Huff conclude. Maybe they can have a long talk with Matt Taibbi.