From the inside: Matt Taibbi explains why the media want to keep Americans perpetually at war...

...with each other!

In fact, "Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another" is the subtitle of Matt Taibbi's latest book, Hate Inc. (OR Books, 2019), which I have just finished reading and recommend highly. Mr Taibbi's political views are quite different from mine, but I always enjoy reading his accounts of what's really happening in American politics. He is a worthy successor to Dr Hunter S. Thompson.

Hate Inc. is something of a confession, a mea culpa for the part Mr Taibbi played in creating and feeding Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), both before and after the revolution of November 2016. See Walt's review of Insane Clown President, WWW 10/8/17.

The author now admits having been deceived by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and having deceived himself into being part of the "groupthink", the "conventional wisdom" purveyed by the lamestream media, which held that someone as worthy as Hellery Clinton couldn't possibly lose to such a patent phony as the Donald. To his credit, Mr Taibbi gives numerous examples of where he went wrong, while at the same time pointing out that he wasn't the only one.

But Hate Inc. is not an apologia for the honest mistakes of the media, because very little of the "news" they fed us was "honest". Mr Taibbi argues that what they gave us, and are still giving us, is a twisted and highly hyped form of the kind of entertainment epitomized by a WWE wrestling match! It wasn't an election, he says, but the grand finale of Wrestlemania, complete with a "babyface" (Mrs Bill) and a "heel" (Mr Trump) straight out of a reality TV show.

The "face" was supposed to win, but somehow managed to defeat herself, and that's a story already told by Mr Taibbi and countless others. The real story of Hate Inc. is why the media did it, and how they are still doing it. The answer is simple. Anger and hatred attract more viewers/readers than sweetness and light. More viewers/readers means more advertising revenue. More advertising revenue means more profit! Especially when you don't have to pay for the content! In fact, election advertising is a hyuge revenue stream for the meeja. The more elections, the more hotly contested, the more money they make.

And you, fellow "news consumers", are swallowing every drop of vitriol, every morsel of loathing, and begging for second and third helpings. In Hate Inc. you will find countless examples of the media's most egregious manipulation of your ignorance, prejudices, and fears. They whipped you into a frenzy, gentle reader, and want to keep you there so you won't log off their websites or turn off your TV, even though "some viewers may find this disturbing!"

I would like to post some excerpts, but Ed. tells me I have gone on long enough and must find just one for the conclusion of this review. Here `tis:

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. Red-staters are told liberals are terror-sympathizers, desperate, out of white guilt, to eviscerate American cultrure from within.

Blue-staters are peppered daily with stories of fellow travelers and traitors in their midst, an incredible example being NBC's effort to paint presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of the Kremlin.... 

This deeply paranoid view of the human experience, telling all America it lives on a violent invisible influence battlefield, is the opposite of what the news used to be.... We are trying to keep your brain locked in conflict, not just for the grubby commerical reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.

What other things? Read the book! If doing so causes you to stop reading WWW, I won't be offended, as long as you also stop watching The View and Rachel Maddow and [That's enough biased "news" sources! Ed.]

Footnotes:
Hate Inc. doesn't have an index (tsk, tsk) but it does have an appendix entitled "Why Rachel Maddow is on the cover of this book". Enough said?

A second appendix is an interview with Noam Chomsky, co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Walt recommends reading this appendix first, before the book itself, to understand where Matt Taibbi is coming from. In the interview, he says to Prof. Chomsky: The main idea of Manufacturing Consent is...that it looks like we have a vigorous system of independent journalists, but the debate has been artificially narrowed. Why that is so is what Hate Inc. is all about.

RIP George "the Animal" Steele

So farewell then, Jim Myers, aka George "the Animal" Steele, who died in Florida this week at the age of 79.

Mr Steele will not likely arise from the grave, as it would appear in this photo, which is actually a still from one of Walt's all-time favourite movies, Ed Wood, in which he starred (as Tor Johnson, "the Swedish Angel") alongside Johnny Depp and Bill Murrray. He played Tor "the Swedish Angel" Johnson, a scary-looking wrestler who was discovered by B-movie director Ed Wood, and featured in Plan Nine from Outer Space. Wrestler turned movie actor. It made sense for Mr Johnson, and even more sense for Mr Steele.

As a WWE wrestler, George "the Animal" Steele sported a bald head, hairy back and green tongue. He was famous for his signature move of sinking his teeth into the turnbuckle pads around the ring. At a Boston Red Sox game in 2012, he pretended to take a bite from the baseball before throwing out a ceremonial first pitch.

Prior to throwing his hat and massive bulk into the ring, Mr Steele (as Jim Myers) earned a master's degree from Central Michigan University, and was a Detroit-area high school teacher and coach. In his last years, he suffered from Crohn's disease and often tweeted about his struggle with the malady, in an effort to raise funds for further research into its cause and treatment. RIP.