nakedcapitalism | Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is the most insightful and revelatory book about American politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal almost four full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.
While Frank’s topic was the abysmal failure of the
Democratic Party to be democratic and Taibbi’s is the abysmal failure of
our mainstream news corporations to report news, the prominent villains
in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite
social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class. In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016)
as he or she takes up Taibbi’s book. And to really do the book the
justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend that the
reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi’s favorite book and vade-mecum, Manufacturing Consent (which
I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless cataloging of the
official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and,
in order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi’s chapter 7,
“How the Media Stole from Pro Wrestling,” visit some locale in Flyover
Country and see some pro wrestling in person (which I found to be
unexpectedly uplifting — more on this soon enough).
Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc. to be an updating of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988),
which he first read thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. “It blew my
mind,” Taibbi writes. “[It] taught me that some level of deception was
baked into almost everything I’d ever been taught about modern American
life…. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics
mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a
buzz saw” (p. 10). For what seemed to be vigorous democratic debate,
Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing simulation of debate. The
choices voters were given were distinctions without valid differences,
and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and
a Big Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet
Coke and Diet Pepsi, between Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was
all profit-making poisonous junk.
“Manufacturing Consent,” Taibbi writes, “explains
that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument
has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it” (p. 11).
And there’s an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of
hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of
view of the big media corporations, a “narrative-ruining” buzz-kill.
“The uglier truth [brought to light in Manufacturing Consent],
that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across Indochina —
ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three
countries — is pre-excluded from the history of the period” (p. 13).
So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a
starting point let’s consider the very useful metaphor found in the
title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin Miller’s Boxed In: The Culture of TV.
To say that Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not
only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of
their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and
therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel
against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the
television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the
workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most
intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to
them could hardly ever become antagonistic.
