The Bombhole Era
Matt Taibbi
Feb 12
The new paperback edition of Hate Inc. has gone to print (for details about
where to find the book, click here). The excerpt below, for Substack
subscribers only, is from the new chapter in the book, looking back at the
Trump years. Thanks to Leighton Woodhouse for his great work on the animated
video above. From the new foreword:
A UTOPIA OF DIVISION
In the Bush years, the conservative political universe was distinguished by
unity of purpose. From Tom Delay's Congress to the Bush/Cheney White House
to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News to the bulk of the country's megachurches,
conservative institutions functioned like one organism. Collectively, they
produced identical rhetoric about the iniquity of everyone from Muslims to
campus leftists, environmentalists, and immigrants, and until the Iraq War
went south they looked poised to rule America for a generation, thanks in
part to the ironclad discipline of message.
By the time Trump came along, discipline was a fading memory. Trump was
seldom perfectly in sync either with traditional Republican media like Fox,
or his own White House press office. Moments in which all three pushed the
same message were rare as pearls. The disconnect between Trump and his
official spokesteam often played out like an intentional slapstick routine.
For example, when Kayleigh McEnany said in July 2020 that Trump was tested
multiple times per day for Covid-19, Trump himself was saying he was tested
on average once every two days, and he "didn't know" if he'd ever been
tested more than once in a day. When Trump actually got the disease, both
Trump and his doctor were proclaiming he was "doing very well" at the exact
moment his press team was saying his health situation was "very concerning."
And so on.
"I might as well be a member of the public," a nameless Trump aide seethed.
The real White House press office was Trump's Twitter feed, which flowed
from Trump's head at all hours and often contradicted not just other
conservative institutions, but itself. The feed had 88 million followers at
the moment it was shut down by Twitter in January, 2021, and far outpaced
traditional Republican mouthpieces like Fox as a source of aggrandizing,
inciting, or factually wrong statements.
The bulk of the most extreme messaging about movements like "Stop the Steal"
took place in the media equivalent of dark pools: message boards, chats,
Facebook groups, etc. Icons of Republican media like Fox were often
followers to the party, beaten in the rush for ever-crazier conspiratorial
explanations by outlets like OAN and Newsmax, which were less squeamish
about catering to audiences horny for culture war.
Stations like Fox improbably became sometimes-dissenters to the Hate Inc.
formula during the Trump years, presenting points of view sure to disappoint
core audiences. One of its top anchors, Chris Wallace, was a constant critic
of Trump's, and the station played a huge role in what Trumpists later
denounced as conspiracy by calling the Arizona presidential vote early. In
fact, it was Fox's "early" call at 11:20 p.m. that triggered the first Trump
tantrum that night. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, a much-loathed figure in blue
America, was denounced in late November by Trump fans for pooh-poohing the
stolen election tales, saying Trump attorney Sidney Powell had not provided
evidence.
Trump, especially in his final period, pushed polarizing rhetoric to places
where the commercial conservative press was not willing to follow, leading
to profit-disrupting scenes of real intramural disagreement. Fox lost 6
percent of its audience in November alone as Trump urged followers to move
to rival sources like OAN. The post-Trump conservative movement was
rudderless, half-underground, and almost totally incoherent, united on only
one question: its loathing for the cultural mainstream on the other side,
which increasingly appeared as the united front conservatives used to be.
________________________________________
The blue-state media landscape once featured a broad-ish diversity of
opinions. In the Bush years especially, online media created many new
institutional homes for left-leaning audiences, especially for people who
identified as more progressive than traditional Democrats.
The Huffington Post, The Young Turks, and Daily Kos won audience as more
strident opponents of the Iraq invasion and promoters of ideas like
single-payer health care. They joined existing publications like Mother
Jones and The Nation to create a more labor-friendly, less militaristic
counterweight to the Clintonian centrism that reigned at larger papers like
The New York Times. In the Obama years, after the revelations of
whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, The Intercept
appeared as yet another oppositional source, applying pressure on issues of
war, privacy, and surveillance especially.
When Trump won, the distinctions between these outlets vanished almost
overnight. Content increasingly was organized around furious opposition to
Trump. The theme of unending crisis - not just crisis but emergency, a
distinction expressed by news agencies via blaring chyrons screaming
descriptors like BREAKING - was central to the new coverage concept. The
hyper-intense tone was a deliberate strategy. A slow news day was understood
as normalizing Trump's presence in the White House. It was not politically
possible for nothing to be terribly wrong, even for a moment. This had to be
felt in the voices of newsreaders, which meant fewer sunny asides, fewer
cat-in-tree stories, fewer one-liner-laden tosses to weathermen, and - more
crises.
Nearly all of institutional America joined in the howling section, from
Hollywood to Wall Street to Silicon Valley to NATO and the intelligence
community. Trump was described by all in tones remarkably similar to the
coverage of the likes of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, and Manuel
Noriega. For the first time, America's own president was in the infamous
"Hitler of the month club," that union of adversaries of the American state
battered in our media until the public assented to invasion or whatever
policy objective was being sought against them at the time.
News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a
tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar
casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but
news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything
like there's no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow?
The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to
the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next
controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were
memory-holed.
The American Napoleon generated controversies at such a fantastic rate that
stations like CNN and MSNBC (and Fox too) were able to keep ratings high by
moving from mania to mania, hyping stories on the way up but not always
following them down. The moment the narrative premise of any bombshell
started to fray, the next story in line was bumped to the front.
News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi
journalism.
This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a
memory-hole - call it Bombholing - needed a polarized audience to work. As
surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target
demographics in Trump's America increasingly did not communicate with one
another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience
and 95 percent of MSNBC's, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers.
When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the
original target audience would never learn the difference.
This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even
when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny.
If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more
about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For
conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For
"liberal" audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the
defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.
A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for
mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky,
first-draft-like blockbusters. They wanted to be in the trenches of
information discovery. Audiences were choosing powerful highs over lasting
ones.
Moreover, if after publication another shoe dropped in the form of
mitigating information, audiences were disinterested, even angry. Those
updates were betrayals of the entertainment contract, like continuity
errors. Companies soon learned there was a downside to once-mandatory
ethical practices. Silent edits at newspapers became common, and old
standards like the italicized editor's note at the bottom of the page
letting you know this or that story had been "updated" began to disappear.
The political impact of all this was that the news watcher in the Trump
years became more addicted to the experience of being outraged, while
retaining less about specific reasons for outrage. Audiences remembered some
big stories and big themes, but stopped digesting each story on its own,
rarely bothering to look back at the meaning of various manias after they'd
died down.
As George Orwell understood when he created the "memory hole" concept in
1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history. In the
Trump era, news audiences volunteered to stop the disobedient act of
remembering.
They brought a pure, virginal belief to watching news, and agreed to
unquestioningly accept any new versions of the past put forward. This was
Hate Inc. brought to its logical conclusion. Fox and MSNBC already knew how
to monetize anger by setting audiences against one another. The innovation
of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of
editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences
themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up
anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers. Mistakes
became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.
Conservative audiences had already long ago been pushed to become story
addicts, and were used to having the rhetorical ante constantly upped,
making them susceptible to tall-tale artists like Trump and Internet fairy
tales like Q.
Blue state audiences now gobbled up the same formula. Coverage of Trump was
so constant and full-throated that all other topics stopped having news
value. The first stories to be memory-holed were the ones that preceded
Trump's entrance into politics: war crimes in Iraq, drone killings,
financial inequality (destined to be re-christened a mockable fictional
problem called "economic insecurity"), the failure to close Guantanamo Bay,
lack of enforcement of white-collar crime, and a dozen other things.
Bombholing generated errors at a fantastic rate. There's no way to truly
understand the depth of how badly this phenomenon infected media in
2016-2020 without going through each story step-by-step, but even a sample
of stories that dominated news cycles but later fell apart is instructive.
For instance, before Trump became president, Yahoo! cited a "well-placed
Western intelligence source" in telling us that former Trump aide Carter
Page was a "possible back channel" between the Trump campaign and the
Kremlin.
Years later it would be revealed that the "Western intelligence source" was
actually ex-spy Christopher Steele, a paid researcher of the Clinton
campaign, who provided the never-confirmed information to authorities. He
was also the source of the "pee tape" and countless other bombshell themes.
The Yahoo! story itself ended up being used as part of an improper warrant
application for secret FISA surveillance on Page. Writer Michael Isikoff
told me he later came to understand that Steele's report was "flawed," and
moreover that he didn't know at the time he wrote the report that Steele was
working for Clinton.
In late October, 2016, Slate also told audiences of a mysterious server tied
to the Russian Alfa-Bank that had been communicating with the Trump
organization. Over the course of years, dozens of stories came out of this
"revelation." Significantly, most were published well after the FBI
determined in early 2017 that there were no links between Trump and Alfa
Bank, which means many official sources stayed quiet as news they knew to be
false circulated. The latter fact came out in the report of Justice
Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
In the early Trump years, reporters were very concerned with the origin
story of Trump's conspiracy with Russia. When papers like The New York Times
were told that a Trump aide named George Papadopoulos triggered the probe
after repeating a tale from a mysterious Maltese professor about the
Russians having "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, Papadopoulos became front-page
news as the Patient Zero of the conspiracy. The first Times story on this
figure came out in October of 2017.
Years later, Congress would release testimony from then-deputy FBI director
Andrew McCabe to the effect that the Bureau concluded as early as August,
2016 - over a year before the Times story - that evidence "didn't
particularly indicate" that Papadopoulos had any links to any Russians. In
fact, McCabe testified that the reason the FBI moved on to Carter Page as a
target was that Papadopoulos was understood to be a dead-end (Page proved to
be a similar dead-end).
Yet Papadopoulos was the predicate for the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" probe
into Trump's relationship with Russia, the probe that became the Mueller
investigation. Blue state audiences were essentially never told that this
investigation was at best grounded in erroneous information.
On the day the Horowitz report blew up the pee tape, the Carter Page story,
and countless other once-hot scandals, the front page of the New York Times
read, REPORT DEBUNKS ANTI-TRUMP PLOT IN RUSSIA INQUIRY. Beneath the banner
were two smaller headlines, each with its own story. Another headline on the
same page noted that Trump possibly faced two impeachment articles,
"Ukrainegate" by then being the more urgent breaking news fixation.
This showed the whole Bombhole formula. A series of inaccurate stories began
running in 2016, introducing audiences to the idea that candidate Trump had
an elaborate, secret relationship with the Kremlin. When these stories were
later debunked, in the context of a report that also detailed an improper
(and perhaps illegal) surveillance campaign, the press mostly ignored that
angle and quietly reported the Trump-Russia investigation had been further
legitimized, while keeping the bulk of audience attention on the new
bombshell topic in Ukraine.
There were more mundane screwups not directly related to Trump, like the
colossal error in the New York Times "Caliphate" podcast. The paper of
record did an entire series based upon the storytelling of a Canadian Muslim
who claimed he had committed atrocities for ISIS, including crucifixions.
But when Abu Huzayfah was arrested by Canadian authorities for perpetrating
a hoax, the Times refused to take the full hit, instead claiming that their
series had in part been about exploring whether or not Huzayfah's story was
true. Another story involving a group of high-school-age Trump supporters
from Covington, Kentucky who supposedly accosted a Native American man in
Washington, was massively misreported, creating a huge swell of cultural
resentment among conservatives, while mainstream audiences mostly didn't
hear the story's flip side.
The extreme danger from the beginning of the Trump era was not just that the
White House might be occupied by an unfit person, but that American
institutions might follow him into disrepute. This happened with
institutional media, which responded to a hyperbolic, unreliable president
by taking on those same qualities to an extreme degree. Their permanent
crisis doubled as a political campaign to prevent Trump's "normalization"
and a scheme to boost profits by addicting audiences to a never-ending
narrative of moral mania.
To keep it up, elite media made the same request of audiences that Trump
regularly made to his own fans, that what was said and done ten minutes ago
be forgotten in a world where only the present mattered. Memory became
taboo, present conflict the only allowable orientation: a utopia of
division.
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