hate inc

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.