Matt Taibbi for RollingStone: Keep on Hatin'

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http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/46069/

Keep on Hatin'

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted December 29, 2006.

At the year's end, a look back on the birth of the media's hate era.

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If you lived in America in the last 15 years and happened not to be a fan of Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, you almost certainly turned on Fox News at some point and found yourself unfairly bound at the hip with some invidious America-hating villain, and denounced as an accomplice in his "treason" simply because you happened to share some particular policy opinion, like opposition to the Iraq war. And if you had any backbone at all, had even a shred of decency, your instinct was to reject this crude and vicious attempt at political labeling and come to the defense of this supposed villain, stand with him, show solidarity. After about ten years of this -- before you know it -- there is a whole diverse class of people standing now united with very similar passions, those passions mainly having to do with resenting being labeled by the likes of Hannity and O'Reilly and feeling bound to others in opposition to their tactics. Thus, after a time, a media strategy aimed at coalescing a broad middle under a paranoid umbrella against a smaller common enemy has the effect of backing said enemies into their own paranoid corner, where they in turn are ripe to be seized and eaten by some other canny media predator using exactly the same tactics.

That's what's happening now. When I go to a bookstore now, I don't see any relief from the same basic Blame, Hate, Coalesce strategy Murdoch started rolling half a generation ago. I just see it working in reverse. We had Bernie Goldberg's "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America" and now we have Keith Olbermann's "The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders." We had Bill O'Reilly's "Culture Warrior" and we now have "Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly." We had Ann Coulter's "Godless," which in turn spawned "Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter" and "Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate" and even the inspired "I Hate Ann Coulter!" by Anonymous. You had Rush's "The Way Things Ought to Be" and the way things are according to Al Franken, which is that Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. For those who don't want to buy all the new liberal books, you can get it all in one volume in "The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Hideous Truth About America's Ugliest Conservatives," edited by Clint Willis.

Now this phenomenon is spilling into the airwaves in a successful way for the first time, where shows like Olbermann's and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are cutting into the Fox lead. I think all of those guys are funny, and in a far smaller way I'm sure I'm caught up in the same phenomenon. But I think it's time for all of us to admit that something extremely sinister is happening in the American media landscape. We are being split up into rigid camps and kept doped up on fear, hate and invective. At the end of 2006 we are a country without life-threatening economic or political problems whose population is utterly consumed with paranoia, divided into two insoluble groups, with each genuinely afraid of being exterminated by the other.

It is amazing to me that people can walk into a bookstore, see a pair of books whose titles begin with "I Hate...," and still believe that the two books are different, simply because the politics of one are conservative and the politics of the other are liberal. Even though it is astoundingly obvious, I'm beginning to think that the vast majority of Americans will not realize until it is too late that this is the same shit. Hating the other guy, it's the new racism. It's imposed from above, like racism, and it serves the same purpose. It keeps the population mesmerized by irrelevant passions and distracted from their natural business of tending to their own real political problems.

And it just so happens that at the beginning of 2007, this paralyzing hatred is our biggest real political problem. It has become bigger than the individual policy issues at play in the ongoing argument between liberalism and conservatism. It has corrupted our thinking and infected us with a profound spiritual sickness. And, it has inclined us all to extremist political positions that we would never take without media figures telling us that our neighbors were secretly scheming to stamp out our very existences. But we'll never figure that out, not as long as we remain focused on who's winning in the left-right battle. It doesn't matter that Fox is down and that the other team is getting a bump in the ratings. It's the split that's remained consistent, and the split is the problem.