Inc Media Quotes

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As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
One political party may be preferable to another. A news channel, though, can’t be a vehicle for a political party and be anything but a bad thing.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
You can tell a lot about a country by how boring its media is. If you turn on the TV and immediately feel like going to sleep, it generally means the political class feels secure.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The human brain just isn’t designed to take in a whole world’s worth of disturbing news. Most of us have enough trouble with the more mundane problems of finding inner peace and securing happiness for our loved ones.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says ‘Make Me Feel Important.’ Not only will you succeed in business, but you will succeed in life.” —MARY KAY ASH, FOUNDER OF MARY KAY COSMETICS
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
Irony alert: the most important news story in the world is the inability of the ordinary news consumer to understand the news. This is no dig against readers. The world has just grown so complex that the majority of serious issues are beyond the understanding of non-specialists.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Media is an assemblage of tools with which to expand an audience's conception of what "the world" is to such and extent that their own lives and capabilities seem utterly insignificant; a means of psychological warfare by which people are overloaded with information and desensitized to their own and others' suffering; the sum of all means by which human beings reduce the infinite complexity of reality to a dead-end maze of abstractions.
CrimethInc. (Contradictionary)
The London-based Reprieve organization found that 1,147 people were killed by drones in efforts to kill just forty-one men.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
So long as we remain a bitterly divided two-party state, we’ll never want for TV villains.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Kalau masih katanya, kamu harus cari tahu faktanya.
Iwan Esjepe
as is curiously also the case with high-level politicians, top on-air personalities and print editorialists are never geniuses. They almost never say or write surprising things. They don’t dazzle or amaze.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
In my experience conservatives hate reporters mainly because they see us as phonies. We reject the idea that we belong to a class, or that we have our own tribal beliefs. Sometimes the hypocrisy is something they’ve seen—upper-class liberals, railing about racism in the heartland from the comfort of an all-white suburban town, where they occasionally tip a Puerto Rican gardener or hire a Republican plumber. But a lot of it has to do with approach and tone, the way we openly write for and celebrate professional-sect audiences, unlike the columnists of the past, the Mike Roykos or Jack Newfields, who were unembarrassed to write in the language of the working person.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
You fail if you don’t try. If you try and you fail, yes, you’ll have a few articles saying you’ve failed at something. But if you look at the history of American entrepreneurs, one thing I do know about them: An awful lot of them have tried and failed in the past and gone on to great things.” —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF THE VIRGIN GROUP
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The public largely misunderstands the “fake news” issue. Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most “lies” are errors of omission or emphasis. There are no Fox stories saying blue states have lower divorce rates, nor are there MSNBC stories exploring the fact that many pro-choice Democrats, particularly religious ones, struggle with a schism between their moral and political beliefs on abortion.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
classical style, and is likely to be adapted to other musical genres in the future. Like Eureqa, Iamus has resulted in a start-up company to commercialize the technology. Melomics Media, Inc., has been set up to sell the music from an iTunes-like online store. The difference is that compositions created by Iamus are offered on a royalty-free basis, allowing purchasers to use the music in any
Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future)
The expectation of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media was inconsistent with the prior trend, over fifty years, of African Americans giving 11 to 16 percent of their vote to Republican and Independent candidates in presidential elections. Among recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Al Gore in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 have received 90 percent or more of the black vote. Hillary Clinton received 88 percent of the African American vote. Stop the Steal, Inc. I
Roger Stone (The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution)
More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences. This is a major structural flaw of the new fully divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, says it best:     It’s hard work. I’m not going to lie. Anyone who tells you that it’s really easy to build a content business is not telling you the truth. You have to accept the fact that this is going to be grueling, difficult, time consuming, and laborious work. But if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get dirty, and are willing to constantly analyze what you’re doing and scrap what doesn’t work and continue what does work, and keep at it, you can be very, very successful.
Joe Pulizzi (Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses)
Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
What's the point of doing anything if nobody's watching?
CrimethInc. (Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink For Beginners)
The two fuels that run Untruth, Inc., are, first, a realization that most of the president’s policies, whether deliberately or as a result of indifference and laziness, run counter to what most Americans support, and, second, a media establishment so invested in his agenda that it will not call the administration to account. So the engine of lying keeps humming. On any given day the president of the United States can step up to the teleprompter amid the latest disaster and swear that he did not do what he just did, or insist that someone else, not he, did the dastardly deed, or simply skip over recent history and make things up. The press at first quibbles, then nods in agreement, and Obama is empowered to do it again and again. We have not seen such a disingenuous president since Richard Nixon — but he, at least, was countered rather than enabled by the media.
Anonymous
Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.sendmail, the image of a flying fox, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers
Anonymous
Berkshire Hathaway Public Holdings April 4, 2012 Company Holding Value Stake The Coca-Cola Company (KO) $14.69 billion 8.8% International Business Machines (IBM) $13.17 billion 5.4% Wells Fargo (WFC) $12.99 billion 13.0% American Express (AXP) $8.69 billion 2.8% Proctor & Gamble $5.16 billion 2.8% Kraft Foods $3.32 billion 4.9% Wal-Mart Stores $2.36 billion 1.1% ConocoPhillips $2.22 billion 2.3% U.S. Bancorp $2.16 billion 2.3% Johnson & Johnson $1.90 billion 1.1% Moody’s Corp $1.20 billion 12.8% DIRECTV $995 million 2.9% Washington Post Co. $645 million 22.4% M&T Bank Corp $465 million 4.3% Costco Wholesale Corp $386 million 1.0% Visa Inc. $341 million 0.35% Intel Corp. $321 million 0.23% CVS Caremark $315 million 0.55% USG Corp $283 million 16.2% General Dynamics $281 million 1.1% DaVita Inc. $233 million 2.9% Dollar General $210 million 1.3% Torchmark $208 million 4.2% MasterCard Inc. $174 million 0.3% Verisk Analytics $162 million 1.9% General Electric $153 million 0.07% Sanofi SA $153 million 0.15% Liberty Media $149 million 1.4% United Parcel Service $114 million 0.15% GlaxoSmithKline $68 million 0.06% Bank of New York Mellon $43 million 0.15% Ingersoll Rand $26 million 0.2% Gannett $26 million 0.73% Source: CNBC, Warren Buffet Watch.
David Andrews (The Oracle Speaks: Warren Buffett In His Own Words (In Their Own Words))
Twitter Inc. has a proposition for app makers: Let’s start over. Two years ago, Twitter irked developers with stricter rules around applications that plug into the social-media service.
Anonymous
Professional sorts in big service firms will have to take more responsibility for educating themselves. People will also have to learn how to sell themselves, through personal networking and social media or, if they are really ambitious, turning themselves into brands. In a more fluid world, everybody will need to learn how to manage You Inc.
Anonymous
As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t. In other words, we can’t see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small chance event. When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving. But these kinds of misperceptions ultimately deceive us. And this has consequences in business—and for the way we manage. When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success. If you run a business that is covered with any frequency by the media, you may face another challenge. Journalists tend to look for patterns that can be explained in a relatively small number of words. If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified. When managing a company that is often in the news, as Pixar is, we must be careful not to believe our own hype. I say this knowing that it is difficult to resist, especially when we are flying high and tempted to think we have done everything right. But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s reality.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
A small company cannot afford to carry dead wood on staff, so start smart by taking time to figure out your staffing needs before you even begin looking for job candidates.
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
Tell the truth, but make it fascinating.” —DAVID OGILVY, FOUNDER OF OGILVY & MATHER
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
In other words, your mission statement doesn’t have to be clever or catchy—just accurate.
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm . . . in the real world all rests on perseverance.” —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, AUTHOR
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
I never let my mistakes defeat or distract me, but I learn from them and move forward in a positive way.” —LILLIAN VERNON, FOUNDER OF LILLIAN VERNON CORPORATION
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc (Start Your Own Business: The Only Startup Book You'll Ever Need)
A civilian-based diplomacy supports noncommercial, nonprofit, and publicly-subsidized media to counteract the corporate-controlled, for-profit, private media that dominate political discourse; and works to place media control, ownership, and lobbying at the center of public policy debate.
Nancy Snow (Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World (Open Media Series))
Most homework assignments now depend on your child using techSALE Inc. nology, so it becomes harder to enforce rules that limit screentime. It’s a challenge to monitor what your child is actually doing in front of FOR Publ., a screen without hovering and creating tension. The more your child NOT participates in making her own rules, the more likely she is to respect them on her own. ONLY Shambhala • Don’t leave your child out of rules she needs to follow.USE 28, 2015 • Do use rule-making as a teachable moment. MEDIA April FOR Replace “no” with “Yes, after ______
Anonymous
The pursuit of truth, as a form of political action, is inherently disruptive, anti-authoritarian, and dangerous to those content with the way things are.
Nancy Snow (Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World (Open Media Series))
Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates.
Nancy Snow (Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World (Open Media Series))
Scarcity leads to hoarding, which is a far cry from living an abundant life where God supplies all your needs “according to His riches in glory.” If you believe, as Jack Kemp did, that we can grow the pie, then you’re likely to be more generous with what you’ve been blessed with. But if you believe that you (and your children and their children) could lose your already-small piece of the pie, you will become fearful and angry. So which are you? Even for those who put their trust in the Lord, there are some things worthy of fear. Sometimes bad things do happen to good nations. However, it’s important to realize that huge industries called “Politics, Inc.” and “Media, Inc.” profit from pushing our emotional buttons to extremes.
Matt K. Lewis (Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump)
Ailes used to say: “The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.” Translation: you needed to pull hard the other way to achieve “balance” overall. “Fair and balanced,” in other words, was a rip on the idea that standard, dull, third-person New York Times–style media was already balanced. Twenty years before it would become a popular rallying cry on the other side, Roger Ailes was essentially using an argument about “false balance” to market Fox.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Non-voters are the single biggest factor in American political life, and their swelling numbers are, just like the Trump phenomenon, a profound indictment of our system. But they don’t exist on TV, because they suspend our disbelief in the Hitler vs. Hitler show.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The networks didn’t want to encourage constructive political activism, so the “fight” always involved a ferocious, deregulation-mad, race-baiting winger pounding the crap out of a spineless, backpedaling centrist masquerading as a “leftist.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
There are people in the world worth laughing at. They’re called politicians.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
We can excuse almost anything in America except losing. And we love a freak show.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
As in politics, there are huge areas of overlap in “left” and “right” media, between MSNBC and Fox. Both channels, despite seemingly opposite politics, need you to be identically receptive to advertising. So neither channel will gross you out with stories about the maquiladora where Mexican workers are earning 70 pesos a day making your kids’ toys. They won’t scare you about the forests we’re clearing around the globe to feed the cattle we turn into cheap hamburgers advertised in between segments.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
one story everyone can safely cover is how much we hate each other. There’s no institutional or commercial taboo that story violates.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The only constant will be more and more authoritarian solutions. In the social media age, we can scare you as never before. Which means politicians will have an easier time obtaining permission for censorship, surveillance, immigration bans, and other expanded powers.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
News companies don’t just want you feeling ashamed of not knowing the news. That’s desperate marketing, ring-around-the-collar tactics. They want you so emotionally invested that your psyche falls apart if the wrong story appears on screen. We want you awake at night, teeth chattering, panicking about things over which you have no control.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The one thing Mr. Sportscaster can’t ever do is remind audiences it’s just a game. He or she can’t ever tell them it’s okay not to care.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
the two most taboo lines in all media in America are I don’t know and I don’t care.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The paranoia about both national media and the opposing fans is now such a central part of the fan experience that for some modern fans, the dread of an opposing city reveling in their city’s loss outweighs the potential satisfaction of winning.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Content is designed not just to be lurid and sensational, but immediately disquieting from a psychological standpoint. You’re meant to see something in the first flash that upsets you to the point of needing to hang in at least until mental balance is restored.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The news was once a placid ritual designed to amp down the viewer’s political reflex.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The first rule of modern commercial media is you’re allowed to screw up, in concert. So there was no reckoning for the WMD mess. The chief offenders kept perches or failed up.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform. But we assume you’ll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring over content specifically designed to reenforce your point of view. In fact, you’ll consume twice as much, rather than admit you don’t like to be challenged.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation. This is the trick. The schism is the conventional wisdom. Making the culture war the center of everyone’s universe is job one. A better way to think about it is that there are two sets of conventional wisdom: one for one “side,” one for the other.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
A Maddow–O’Donnell handoff is always drearily about anti-Republican solidarity, just as a Tucker Carlson–Sean Hannity baton-pass, while less formalized, never leaves the anti-Democrat theme for a second. We are always at war with each other. It never stops, not for one second. This is a profound expression of political instability at the top of our society.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Listening in anger to your favorite political program, you will act like a person who is shaking a fist at power, when in fact you’ve been neutralized as an independent threat, reduced to a prop in a show.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
It’s not easy for any security official to find a journalist with the intelligence, integrity, and wherewithal to successfully protect their identities. When an official finds a reporter who’s proved he or she will not burn them by running off-the-record disclosures, the official will tend to want to protect that relationship. The official therefore will not knowingly dump a big steaming pile on that reporter’s lap.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we’re now manufacturing discontent. It’s the only way to prevent a popular uprising. It can’t hold. As we saw with the election of Trump and with the Bernie Sanders campaign (and with countless protest movements around the world, from Catalonia to the Gilets Jaunes), voters are not completely stupid. They know enough to be angry. Commercial news media has tried frantically to come up with enough red capes to keep us charging forward, but they’re running out of gimmicks.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
As one of the British officials involved in planning this war noted (in a memo that came out years later), some of the details dumped on the public wouldn’t “hoodwink a real expert.” But that wasn’t the person they needed to fool. They needed to get exhausted, confused, frustrated audiences, heads all mixed up with fear and anger and a determination to act after 9/11, to buy a case for war that at best was designed to hold up to only temporary scrutiny. This technique of wearing out viewers with details had come into play somewhat before, with stories like Whitewater and Monicagate, but Iraq was a real milestone. It set the stage for future stories that urged audiences to accept complex sets of plots and subplots on faith. Another main lesson of Iraq was that media figures who get things wrong do not experience professional consequences. Instead, they remain in place or are promoted, in
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Celebrated radio man Walter Winchell worked for a newspaper called the Graphic early in his career. Legend has it he was asked in those days if he worked at a newspaper. He supposedly joked in reply: “Yeah, but don’t tell my mother. She still thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
No crowd of millions ever banged down the door of Time magazine and demanded, “We want a president who’s a good beer companion.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The amazing closeness of American elections has never made sense. In a country in which 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth, you’d expect the very rich to be a permanent electoral minority. That it doesn’t work out that way is odd. But this is not the kind of observation pundits tend to make.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The whole “electability” question usually implies a) there’s a candidate in this field who’s most likely to win, and b) there’s a candidate who appeals to you on a policy level, and c) those candidates are not the same person.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The easiest way to predict what kinds of “electability” stories you’ll see in an election season is to look at the field of candidates and see which ones have a lot of lobbying and ad money behind them. Those candidates will be described as electable. Everyone else will get the “polls say” treatment.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
not only is the structure of the modern economy inaccessible to ordinary consumers, it can be inaccessible to the people setting public policy. Often, it’s beyond the CEOs in relevant industries (AIG sank in part because executives did not understand its own financial products).
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones (read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising). That’s why we don’t show poverty on TV unless we’re laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo) or chasing it in squad cars (Cops).
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Trump was a demon from hell sent to punish all of these reporting sins.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Two data points stood out after 2016. One involved those polls that showed confidence in the media dipping to all-time lows. The other involved unprecedented ratings. People believed us less, but watched us more.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Intellectual diversity” in a major news outlet means “someone from both parties.” You will connect with one or the other. It doesn’t matter which one.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the “folk devil” of the moment. A perfect partnership.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
This is the hallmark of the moral panic scenario. It’s a real story, but it’s exaggerated, often wildly, and comes wrapped in proposals for authoritarian solutions.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
In the social media age, we can scare you as never before. Which means politicians will have an easier time obtaining permission for censorship, surveillance, immigration bans, and other expanded powers.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
There's nowhere to go from Hitler. It's a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at that point. If you go there, you're now absolbing your audiences of all moral restraint, because who wouldn't kill Hitler? You can draw a straight line from these rhetorical escalations in right-wing media to the lunacies of the Trump era. If you can believe the Peace Corps is the SS, then why doubt Muslims in Jersey City were cheering 9/11, or question the logic of an anti-rape wall across the Rio Grande? Stupid is stupid.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Most people are terrified of throwing their vote away, so they'll steer clear of any candidate the press tells them has no chance. Particularly when the incumbent is odious, voters won't vote their own interest and conscience. They actually think it's their civic duty not to. The trick works best with political minority groups, who've been trained to vote according to how they're told a larger plurality thinks. Until pretty recently, if you were nonwhite, female, single, childless, or gay, you were typically told you had to choose between a slew of straight white candidates who "polls said" had an actual chance.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
We fumbled “Why do they hate us?” badly after 9/11, when us was guiltless America and they were Muslims in the corrupt Middle Eastern petro-states we supported.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
We made a joke of it during the Occupy protests, when “Why are they so angry?” somehow became a common news feature assignment after a fraud-ridden financial services sector put millions in foreclosure and vaporized as much as 40 percent of the world’s wealth. More recently, we’ve cycled through a series of unconvincing responses to Why do they hate us?—themed stories like Brexit, the Bernie Sanders primary run of 2016, and the election of Donald Trump.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
An oft-cited Gallup poll taken just after the 2016 election showed just 20 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers. An 80 percent no-confidence vote would be cause for concern in most professions.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
In the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” era, many in the press wear their public repudiation like badges of honor, evidence that they’re on the right journalistic track. Few seem troubled by the obvious symbiosis between Trump’s bottom-feeding, scandal-a-minute act and the massive boom in profits suddenly animating our once-dying industry (even print journalism, a business that pre-Trump seemed destined to go the way of 8-track tapes, has seen a bump in the Trump years).
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Rutenberg said we had to grit our teeth and give up “balance, that idealistic form of journalism with a capital ‘J’ we’ve been trained to always strive for.” Why? Because “now that he is the Republican nominee for president, the imbalance is cutting against [Trump].” An increased effort to scrutinize this candidate, call out his shit, etc., would hurt him at the polls, the theory went. In reality, this column helped plant the seeds of the infamous symbiosis of today. What Rutenberg really meant by giving up “balance” wasn’t going after Trump more—we were already calling him every name in the book—but de-emphasizing scrutiny of the other side.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
One additional bizarre Trump-inspired change to reporting that took place in 2016 involved polls: we increasingly ignored data favorable to Trump and pushed surveys suggesting a Clinton landslide. The Times ran a piece in October pronouncing the race essentially over, telling us to expect a “sweeping victory at every level” for Clinton.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Election Day, 2016 was a historic blow to American journalism. It was as if we’d invaded Iraq and discovered there were no WMDs in the same few hours.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Given that most actual voters were sunk in debt, working multiple jobs, uninsured, saddled with ruined credit scores, and often battling alcohol and opiate addiction and other problems, it was a horrific aristocratic insult to tell people each election cycle that what really mattered to them was what candidate looked most convincing carrying a rifle on a duck hunt.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
We are now eating into the profits of the entertainment business. Completing a decades-long slide, the news has become a show, and not just in campaign years, but always.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
To make money, we’ve had to train audiences to consume news in a certain way. We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. Moreover we need you to bring a series of assumptions every time you open a paper or turn on your phone, TV, or car radio.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
It boggles my mind that people think they’re practicing real political advocacy by watching major corporate TV, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV?
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
Though most of our problems are systemic, most of our public debates are referendums on personality. Not many people can be neutral on the subject of Trump, so we wave him at you all day long. Meanwhile, a vast universe of systemic issues is ignored. We’ve been steadily narrowing that field of view for decades, particularly in investigative reporting.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
The central banking policies have been supported by what we think of as the entire range of allowable political thought in America, i.e. from Bush-era Republicans who signed off on the original bank bailouts through the Obama Democrats who followed.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
In 2016 especially, news reporters began to consciously divide and radicalize audiences. The cover was that we were merely “calling out” our divisive new president, Donald Trump. But from where I sat, the press was now working in collaboration with Trump, acting in his simplistic mirror image, creating a caricatured oppositional demographic and feeding it content. As Trump rode to the White House, we rode to massive profits. The only losers were the American people,
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
This is a major structural flaw of the new fully divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly. This has been the main reportorial difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David Remnick’s post-invasion protestations that “nobody got [WMD] completely right,” the Iraq War was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get it right, and protested on the streets. There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press landscape from the start, with people like Jack Shafer tearing apart every Judith Miller story in print. Most reporters are Democrats and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
#Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)