“News consumers on both sides today behave like cultists, self-isolating intellectually, kept that way with a steady diet of terrifying stories about fellow citizens...Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.” – Hate, Inc.
The days of the independent news journalist are over. Far removed from the tenacious beat reporter delivering straight unadulterated news, corporate shills now parrot manufactured narratives delegated from a handful of conglomerates that cater to influential special interests, including the government. Acting as PR specialists for the power structure, these media correspondents have long shed any illusion of objectivity. As such, enhancing the bottom line has now become more important than the scoop itself.
Blindsided by Trump’s dazzling feat in the 2016 election, the corporate media spiraled into a level of derangement unseen in American lore. With Hillary out of the way, the media became a willing surrogate to continue her campaign. Buoyed by big profits, the new war became the Media vs. Trump, hate on hate, with the American public hung out to dry.
The newly emboldened media abandoned their once objective reporting of facts and figures and replaced it with deliberate manipulation of information. Mass media, who once competed for enlightened viewers, are now tailoring their prepared storylines to a niche audience of ideologues: the red news versus the blue news. Here, trained sheeple are fed a steady diet of garbage in, garbage out. Media control of the narrative became limited to what historian Tom Woods refers to as “the index card of allowable opinion”. The more they censored, the angrier and more ill-informed the consuming public became. And we soon discovered why Goethe had warned, “There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity”.
The acceleration of the modern-day two-party fracture began with the introduction of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio along with Fox News, new outlets dedicated to telling the other side of the story, long absent from the public square. Armed with its own set of truths, Fox soon cornered the cable market, challenging for the first time the leftist media's exclusive control over the narrative. Then as conservative listeners and viewers segregated to their favored sources, the progressives split in the other direction. With opposing teams suited up and ready for battle, the use of defamation, character assassination, and cancellation accelerated. And with that, the chasm grew.
A closer look at how news organizations are viewed based on a left/right paradigm, confirms our suspicions. The website, All Sides, ranks each news organization's bias level based on a patented bias rating system. The big three media giants: ABC, CBS, and NBC, along with two of the three big cable sites: CNN and MSNBC all lean left, with only Fox News leaning to the right. In terms of size and scope, the networks all significantly outperform the three cable news networks with AP recently reporting nightly news audiences of 9.9 million for NBC; 8.3 million for ABC; and 6.2 million for CBS. A Statista report on the primetime audiences of the three cable networks shows that in 2020, MSNBC averaged 2.2 million viewers while CNN averaged 1.8 million. Alone on the right, Fox News saw an average of 3.6 million viewers. The bottom line: left-leaning news grossly outpaces the right.
In Matt Taibbi’s 2019 book, “Hate, Inc.”, Taibbi looks at the dismal state of American media increasingly focused on politics and profits. Now cut from the same cloth of wealth and privilege, the once adversarial Big News is securely in bed with their equally affluent governmental and corporate bosses, obliged to do their bidding. Oblivious to life outside the Beltway, Taibbi notes how arrogant political pundits and kingmakers increasingly missed the mark in their prognostication of election results. Then saddled with a president, not of their making, the media created their own “big lie”, Russia-gate, which would capture their imaginations for years to come.
Initially, the advent of the Internet seemed to provide an opportunity to break this monopoly power. But Big Tech’s control of the hardware, the servers, and the broadband, has kept independence elusive. Parler, a conservative platform, was partisanly pulled off Amazon servers in an attempt to suppress speech following the 2020 election. Now, the tech giants are recasting their nets to catch more and more objectors through their dubious fact-checking of so-called misinformation, and ongoing censorship of Republicans.
There remains a continuing void where one can go to get a reliable picture of the state of the world. Fortunately, recent events are beginning to have a red pill effect on the public. Deceptive reporting on the Coronavirus, BLM, and the 2020 Election, has left little doubt about the media's questionable intentions. Even unbiased blue-check journalists are starting to push back and demand accountability. Podcasters, independent journalists, and citizen bloggers have stepped up to fill the information gap.
With Trump done and gone, Big News has outgrown its usefulness. What’s left in their wake is a deeply divided and distrusting public. But who really cares? Hate sells.
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