Here’s something almost everyone can agree about: Dysfunctional public discourse is ubiquitous. What is feeding it? There are many ideas out there, but one that I find compelling is that the mass media has adopted “Dysfunctional public discourse” as its favorite method of providing us with “news.” Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone boils down his criticisms into the form of “Ten Rules of Hate.”
First, here is an excerpt from his article:
We’ve discovered we can sell hate, and the more vituperative the rhetoric, the better. This also serves larger political purposes.
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.
That’s not why we do what we do. But it is why we’re allowed to operate this way. It boggles the mind that people think they’re practicing real political advocacy by watching any major corporate TV channel, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. 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.
The trick here is getting audiences to think they’re punching up, when they’re actually punching sideways, at other media consumers just like themselves, who just happen to be in a different silo. Hate is a great blinding mechanism. Once you’ve been in the business long enough, you become immersed in its nuances. If you can get people to accept a sequence of simple, powerful ideas, they’re yours forever. The Ten Rules of Hate.
Here are Taibbi’s Ten Rules, but I highly recommend reading the entire article:
1. THERE ARE ONLY TWO IDEAS – Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. Boolean political identities.
2. THE TWO IDEAS ARE IN PERMANENT CONFLICT
3. HATE PEOPLE, NOT INSTITUTIONS
4. EVERYTHING IS SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT (“The overwhelming majority of “controversial news stories” involve simple partisan narratives cleaved quickly into hot-button talking points. Go any deeper and you zoom off the flow chart”).
5. NOTHING IS EVERYONE’S FAULT (“If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it.”)
6. ROOT, DON’T THINK (“By the early 2000s, TV stations had learned to cover politics exactly as they covered sports, a proven profitable format. The presidential election especially was reconfigured into a sports coverage saga.”)
7. NO SWITCHING TEAMS (“Being out of touch with what the other side is thinking is now no longer seen as a fault. It’s a requirement.”)
8. THE OTHER SIDE IS LITERALLY HITLER
9. IN THE FIGHT AGAINST HITLER, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED. (“If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. It would be illogical to argue anything else. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.”)
10. FEEL SUPERIOR. (“We’re mainly in the business of stroking audiences. We want them coming back. Anger is part of the rhetorical promise, but so are feelings righteousness and superiority.”)
