The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
In "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,"
published in 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky exposed the techniques
that the commercial media used to promote and defend the economic, social
and political agendas of the ruling elites. These techniques included
portraying victims as either worthy or unworthy of sympathy. A Catholic
priest such as Jerzy Popiełuszko, for example, murdered by the communist
regime in Poland in 1984, was deified, but four Catholic missionaries who
were raped and murdered in 1980 in El Salvador by U.S.-backed death squads
were slandered as fellow travelers of the "Marxist" rebel movement. The
techniques also included both narrowing the debate in a way that buttressed
the elite consensus and intentionally failing to challenge the intentions of
the ruling elites or the actual structures of power.
"Manufacturing Consent" was published on the eve of three revolutions that
have dramatically transformed the news industry: the rise of right-wing
radio and Fox-style TV news that abandon the media's faux objectivity, the
introduction of 24-hour cable news stations, and the creation of internet
platforms-owned by a handful of corporations-that control the distribution
of news and information and mine our personal data on behalf of advertisers,
political campaigns and the government. The sins of the old media, bad
though they were, are nothing compared with the sins of the new media. Mass
media has degenerated into not only a purveyor of gossip, conspiracy
theories and salacious entertainment but, most ominously, a purveyor of
hate. Matt Taibbi, the author of "Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Media Makes
Us Hate One Another," has dissected modern media platforms in much the same
way that Herman and Chomsky did the old media.
The new media, Taibbi points out, still manufactures consent, but it does so
by setting group against group, a consumer version of what George Orwell in
his novel "1984" called the "Two Minutes Hate." Our opinions and prejudices
are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital
analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The
result, Taibbi writes, is "packaged anger just for you." The public is
unable to speak across the manufactured divide. It is mesmerized by the fake
dissent of the culture wars and competing conspiracy theories. Politics,
under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on
political personalities. Civic discourse is defined by invective and
insulting remarks on the internet. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and
unchallenged. The result is political impotence among the populace. The
moral swamp is not only a fertile place for demagogues such as Donald
Trump-a creation of this media burlesque-but channels misplaced rage,
intolerance and animosity toward those defined as internal enemies.
The old media sold itself as objective, although as Taibbi points out, this
was more a reflection of tone rather than content. This vaunted objectivity
and impartiality was, at its core, an element of a commercial tactic
designed to reach the largest numbers of viewers or readers.
"Objectivity was when I was told I couldn't write with voice," Taibbi told
me when I interviewed him on my television show, "On Contact." [Part one of
the interview; part two.] "I couldn't write with a point of view.
Objectivity was to write in a dull, flat, third-person perspective. Don't
express yourself. Don't be too colorful. This actually was, if you pick up
The New York Times today, that same writing style. The original idea behind
it is you didn't want to turn off people on the start because they're trying
to reach the widest possible audience. This also infected radio, television.
That's why you have this Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather-style delivery, which was
monotonal, flat, unopinionated. A lot of people thought this was some kind
of an ethical decision that news organizations were making. In fact, what
they were trying to do is reach the greatest number of people to sell the
greatest number of ads. That's how we developed that idea."
The old media rigidly held to the fiction that there were only two kinds of
political opinions-those expressed by Democrats and those expressed by
Republicans. These two positions swiftly devolved into caricatures on radio
and television. The classic example was the show "Crossfire," in which two
antagonists, the stereotypical liberal and the stereotypical conservative,
could never agree. The liberal, Taibbi pointed out, "was always cast as the
person who couldn't punch back. He was always in retreat. The conservative
was always in attack mode. A personality like Tucker Carlson." These staged
and choreographed confrontations were, in essence, sporting events.
