And you will be safer Democratic leaders say Virginians should also expect a higher minimum wage and greater abortion rights after their gangs yesterday in Kentucky the Democrat in the race for governor and he Bashir claimed victory he was slightly ahead despite a last minute visit from President Trump to boost the end come but better than in the deeply Republican state that isn't is not conceding the race it's too close to call in the hard fought San Francisco race for district attorney and for a supervisor seat hitting an ally of Mayor London breed against a tenants rights attorney and unknown number of vote by mail ballots likely thousands of them haven't been counted yet the count as of last night showed interim district attorney Susie Loftus ahead of her main challenger chest of Dean who's run on a platform of implementing transformative racial justice policies as of the last count law this was ahead by 240 votes in the District 5 raise for San Francisco supervisor tenants rights attorney Dean Preston is ahead of incumbent supervisor Valli Brown by 218 votes Preston who ran as a democratic socialist addressed the crowd at his campaign party last night so this could be different this country can be different than we knew it and that we're not going to get there by never going around the edges and accommodating Republicans who are near as. C D good. As him. To stick fries supervisor candidate Dean Preston California attorney general have Yeah but Sarah said he's been investigating Facebook's privacy practices since 2018 but Sarah offered few details of the probe and. Said he was disclosing it only because his office was making a public court filing to force Facebook to answer subpoenas the investigation is into Facebook's practices related to privacy disclosures and 3rd party access to user data more than 11000 scientists from 150 countries warning a letter that clearly and unequivocally planet Earth is facing a climate emergency they warn it's more severe than anticipated threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity I'm Eileen elfin dairy news headlines return it for join us at 6 for the Pacifica evening news. From the studios of King p.s.a. In Berkeley California this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio I'm Sasha. The media system in the United States is often celebrated for its openness and condemned for its proximity to power however it should be characterized has changed a great deal since the early 1990 s. With the rise of 24 hour news outlets like Fox and the Internet unleashing a tsunami of vitriol but often not more insight into the world in which we live. Was the old way of the stand simply objective journalism any better is the present and which journalists are under pressure to deliver corrosive content in great quantities a break with the past is there another way journalist Matt Taibbi has taken a scalpel to the press and the result his hate ink why today's media makes us despise one another He's a correspondent for Rolling Stone and the author of various bestselling books he joins me in studio Matt why do you suggest that viewing or consuming news in this country is akin to smoking. Well 1st of all it's a consumer product I mean I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to do with this book is kind of raise consumer awareness. People in this country we've become sophisticated about what we eat what kind of cars we drive what kind of. Things we do in terms of polluting the atmosphere what kind of energy we use in our homes but. But you don't think about the what they're putting in their brains and commercial news is a consumer products it's a $1000000000.00 business where or essentially trying to do is turn attention into advertising revenue so even though you're not forking over money every time you click on a television news program or read an article just by virtue of paying attention long enough to see an ad somewhere you're participating in that consumer process and I think what people or people don't realize is that the this is becoming a very sophisticated business that uses a lot of the same techniques that big tobacco uses the they're using basically a strategy that Dick's people to upsetting an angry experience and you know there's a lot of research out there that shows that this makes people incredibly unhappy and even mentally ill so that's one of the things. I'm trying to talk about with this book. You write that you originally thought of writing a contemporary take on Chomsky and Edward Herman's classic analysis of the American media system manufacturing consent and in that book they argue that the media system operates not by overt censorship but by presenting debates within a very narrow spectrum of politics and excluding dissent tell us what that book meant for you when you read it as a teenager yeah I read the book when I was about 19 I had grown up in the press My father was a reporter so my earliest memories are all about newsrooms I thought I knew everything about journalism but manufacturing can censor real eye opening book. And it really lays out how the censorship process in America is not censorship per se it's not like it was in the Soviet Union where they come in their red pencil your your copy but the it happens really at the point of higher if you're the kind of person who's going to raise on pleasant issues or make unpleasant and comparisons you just simply won't be promoted to a position of prominence you're not going to be the person who gets the front page slot and you're not going to be the person who gets to be on television reading the news and so the you will you take all these cues when you're in the business about what's an acceptable story and what's not an acceptable story and they just become ingrained in your experience as a reporter and you learn principles and chart and Noam Chomsky and Herman talked about some of them like the idea of worthy and unworthy victims' rights so in the eighty's for instance if a Polish priest was murdered by communists Catholic priests then that was the biggest story in the world because the communists were accused astrally people who had done this terrible thing but if you had a Catholic priest who was murdered by death squads in. Salvador by some other American client state that was less of a story because that was the they were on were the victims and. This isn't nobody tells you to ignore one story and pay attention the other but you just you just sort of get it over the years they were this is what my editors are like this is what they're not going to like and you do have one story and you don't do the other and I was happy when I worked overseas I was in Russia when I was young and I knew that editors would like a story about anything that had to do with capitalism kind of advancing in Russia right so the 1st Ikea opening in in Moscow they were going there anyone would buy a story the 1st k.f.c. You know people getting V.C.R.'s for the 1st time having disposable income going on vacations that would sell but if you had a story about people not getting paid their salaries by the you know mine owners or whatever it was that that wouldn't And so that's go that was about. And yet as you know the media system has changed since the publication of manufacturing consent and in 1988 how do you understand those changes the changes that have taken place since the book came out and how we might incorporate those changes into a broader understanding of the media system Well there's there's 33 really big things that happen 1st of all the development of the 24 hour news cycle. And started in the early eighty's but it really didn't become a big thing until the ninety's and the 1st Iraq war was the 1st real big 24 hour story and the just briefly that that created an enormous pressure on the business to come up with content like we normally would before we were just doing one newspaper a day and maybe 2 newscasts a days we just didn't have to produce that much now all the sudden we had to fill oceans of time and one of the 1st things the networks found out is that just putting 2 people on air in arguing was a great way to fill time they created the appearance of action and people became engaged in that that was one thing you know thing was commercially the whole business was upset by the interest of the by the Internet. Previously journalism made money easily if you had a radio station or broadcast station in a big city there was as it was a scarce amount of air time for selling ads it was almost impossible not to make money in one of those businesses if you had an f.c.c. License also the newspapers had distribution monopolies there were the only place you could do a want that are big ad so they just mean they made tons and tons of money on the internet wiped out the distribution advantage for big media companies and now we were competing against not just other news organizations but people who had Sasquatch sites or whatever it was you know of thousands and thousands of things and the distributors are not us but but you know Facebook and Google and. It's like they got all the I've written this in the 3rd thing was this discovery that L'Express stations like Fox which is that you could make lost money selling slanted media content and and they they had piggybacked on you know the discovery basically in afternoon talk radio in the seventies and in New York this idea that if you didn't have to make things up but you just picked news stories that you knew your audience was going to like and if you just fed the stuff over and over again that they were going to come back and started going for the whole audience you go for a small audience you dominate it that's an easy way to make money so a combination of it was harder to make money generally and this discovery that there was an new easy way to make money fundamentally change the business. It's easy it's too easy in some ways to look back nostalgically had a better media force in the past right in Imagine that you know there was a golden age of fantastic journalism that has now been supplanted But but there certainly was a shift as you're describing and that included moving from broadcasting to large popular audiences and and then the move from that to broadcasting to particular news shows how do you understand that part of the story and the way that the tone changed from one to the other you know that's a really really important point and. And you're absolutely right you don't we don't want to lionize the way the media was before there were tons and tons of problems it was all white guys they missed tons and tons of huge stories back then because they were very they had all kinds of biases that there weren't penetrated but the the the tone which was that sort of Lowell Thomas c.b.s. Tone of you know good morning everybody let's get let's get the widest possible audience. That came from a commercial strategy was about ethics you know this idea objectivity of we the the . Having the kind of neutral. On threatening tone that the whole family could enjoy together it was just always all about getting as many viewers as possible and so that you could sell the most ads in fact that was lower Thomas and self money for the start of the 1st c.b.s. Radio broadcasts he originally wanted to do something else he wanted to he wanted to play up the idea that audiences were riled up and upset by the news and he he But he was told by is sponsored that they want to play a quote down the middle so that they could sell the most ads and so that that idea that c.b.s. A.b.c. N.b.c. . That tone that they brought to the press in that leaked into the newspapers as well a kind of like neutral 3rd person voice that you still see in the New York Times. It was just a commercial strategy but it's fallen out of style now like if you watch cable news they're doing something very different they're going for an emotionally charged heavily politicized voice that is designed to provoke a reaction on only part of the audience as opposed to all of it and that's that's a big big difference and it's not ethically different it's just not ethically worse or better it's just different and it I think it's just more divisive than it used to be do you think that the structure of the Internet has exacerbated that I mean you can see it in can broadcast television but the internet also in many ways allows entities to market things to various different mission markets rather than speaking with a broad voice to public as defined you know right specifically Broadway No you're absolutely right the Internet has accelerated a kind of atomization process. You have so many different outlets that are producing basically news media and they can be incredibly tiny area. You know from people who like to watch cat videos to you know to hardcore you know Marxist Leninist outlets to whatever it is and torture the Drudge Report there's something out there for everybody and the game has become about who can put out the strongest content that keeps people coming back. And see you have to both grab your eyeballs that's the 1st thing but you have to make sure they come back tomorrow too so. Heavily emphasis is emphasizes the idea that you have you need to have a developed relationship with with your readers otherwise they'll just scan the landscape and look for the next big thing and they are doing out there on social media all day long looking for the thing that that's the most exciting so you know that that pushes people towards very specific kinds of strategies to to make it this kind of conspiratorial relationship between you you in the audience which is just exactly the opposite of what we were doing back you know in the sixty's and seventy's say you know what I get there were other problems back then but they were doing that and it seems like volume is another part of that right that to keep people hooked you actually have to keep producing new content over and over again absolutely and you actually have to be afraid of of the of the audiences leaving. Part of the the original bargain one of the reasons that people like for instance the old Cronkite. Broadcast and I write about this in the book is that he very specifically. Had an end to the news you know the his famous sign off and that's the way it is is that it gave people psychological permission to tune out until the next day and it was sort of a psychological promise like it's Ok you can you can go off do your thing we'll be back here tomorrow and people are reassured by that but you can't do that now you have to make sure that they stay. Hoped And so there's this constant pressure to create more and more content to feed people things on social media nobody. The business now is ever really out of work and when they go home there's still on Twitter there's the on Face Book. And so you're you're constantly feeding people stuff and that creates bad habits I think in both directions with audiences and with content creators it's just on a healthy you know we should be paying more attention to our families and our lives in our communities and not being online so much I was speaking with journalist Matt Taibbi he is the author of the book hate Inc why today's media makes us despise one another I'm Sasha they and this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio so it's easy to point to a formal changes in the structure of how media is produced the Internet the 24 hour news cycle cable television but when you look at the changes that have happened to the media system since since the late eighty's when so mentioned earlier Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published their classic work in manufacturing consent are there also changes that you see to the structure of how media is funded to the basic political economy of the media. Well it's still basically a consumer business so there are a couple things about that that are different 1st of all I think back in the day there was a widespread understanding that the news didn't have to make money it was part of it was implicitly part of the bargain from the 1934 Communications Act Basically Well the we the government will lease companies use of the public airwaves and you'll make lots of money doing that but in return you have to produce some content that's in quote unquote the public interest so the implicit bargain was you can have entertainment and sports and all these things will make money and the news is kind of a loss leader and that's Ok it's a public service but that kind of went out of style in the seventy's eighty's ninety's the we want to way from the Fairness Doctrine suddenly companies felt much more economic pressure and so now the news has to make money and it's that's different from it was in the old days and so it's it's less a you know a public service than it is the dinner out now you know just another wing of a media most media businesses so they look at the bottom line in the same way they look at the bottom line of their other divisions n.b.c. Is looking at its programming the same way it looks at its sports programming and its entertainment programming it's just asked to make it has to make a number and so that's that's a different when I 1st came up in the business companies like a.b.c. C.b.s. N.b.c. They had huge bureaus overseas and they were resting lots of money just in the process of gathering the news and they didn't they did it because that that was sort of the standard It just would they were trying to create what they thought was an appropriate news product now they figured out that they don't have to do that they they don't need to do all that work they can just kind of create content that makes people think in a certain way and. You don't have to do all that research in reporting it's just it's not a business expense expense that you need so just the the business itself has fundamentally changed it's gone from being something that we think about as as not really a functioning profit making any As to being something else entirely. Do you think that the relationship between the content of news coverage on commercial media and the commercials that that information is wrapped around has changed where you write that in the era when there was the attempt to use this sort of neutral 3rd party tone to speak in offensively to a broader audience that part of the way that model functioned was that you couldn't have the content the news content be more colorful then the right way advertisements because actually the advertisements for the point right but now that you've got this super colorful over the top news spectacle How does that influence the relationship between that content and the advertising I think the advertisers have a problem with that frankly. You saw this happen on with right wing media already they went they went through a very troubled and they're still going through it but I think the 1st signs of this for with Glenn back where you start to see widespread boycotts of certain advertisers and a lot of times is Don't want to be associated with heavily politicized content and that's it's less of a problem with other with the other side I would say so far but. You know a lot of that is definitely an issue like the news used to be much more favorable to typical consumer advertisers back in the day because they all wanted to be associated with people at Walter Cronkite Walter Cronkite was the most polls show the most trusted person in America for like 13 years running so to be on that broadcast you know if you have. Had he were selling Windex or whatever it was you wanted that association Well do you want that association with a coin Rachel Maddow and in a red state like I think for Taj And that's one of the reasons why the business is kind of struggling right now I mean it's not struggling it's making a lot of money but it's in a different way and you're seeing overwhelmingly that these cable shows are turning to certain kinds of advertisers like you know pharmaceutical companies where people kind of need the product right. And that's you know a troubling thing too because they're going to end up being dependent on on only a small a smaller kind of advertiser a smaller base of advertisers and there were before which is troubling. And you write that as the media has become more vitriolic more spectacular more partisan but actually within a pretty broad spectrum of debate that the profitability of media entities media companies has gone up yeah it has but it's it's kind of a catch 22 so all that all the studies show that the people are consuming the news more than they ever have before. We're just talking about cable I think the number right now is something like since since dollar Trump announced his run the profits are like up $37.00 or 38 percent something along those lines they're doing you know all 3 of the major cable networks are doing you know billions about a $1000000000.00 in profit so you're a little bit more and people are watching more than ever but surveys also show that people believe us less than ever so what does that mean that means they're consuming us more as entertainment than they ever were before or as something that's that's other than informational they maybe they need to do it you know the way they have an emotional new toy to see what's going on all the time they're afraid maybe that's what's going on but they they don't have that kind of warm fuzzy trust the feeling that they used to have about the press whether correctly or incorrectly but that's how they used to feel about us back in the day you know I know just from working in the business that people feel very differently about reporters than they used to you know there's a hostility out there that I never saw before and it's I think it's getting worse. It's of course so easy to point the finger at the Fox News's in all of this but I wonder if you could talk about how you see the so-called respectable press the New York Times for example what role have they played in this changed media landscape in which the sensationalism has proved to be pretty profitable. Well I think the a lot of the major quote unquote respectable media they found themselves that a tremendous kind of a Rubicon kind of a moment in some would say the summer of 2016 is when this was people who were talking about this the most the we had a problem which was Donald Trump was making everybody lots of money and all the networks talked about it you even heard things like in c.b.s. Executive Les Moonves saying it out loud you know that this person is bad for the country but he's great for c.b.s. He's great for the bottom line people are going to say stuff like that and we all I covered Donald Trump's campaign everybody was talking about this like this guy's getting amazing ratings for all of us for getting clicks we never saw before but we we probably helped him get the nomination by giving him all this free press coverage so what do we do and there was a I think what ended up happening in the New York Times in an editorial in the summer of 2016 is testing the norms of objectivity I think is what it was called and the the concept was. That we needed to be weird just not just think about being true but true to history's judgment that we needed to have copious and aggressive coverage and so I think this really meant for media companies was let's not cover him any less Let's just be more negative about it right now that's the way it will justify what we're doing and so is there's there's all kinds of things that happen in the world that are important but if you turn on the news now it's all trump all the time and that's not an accident he is important is the president ited States but he's not everything there is and the universe but he isn't for these companies and he makes money for both the right wing and the other press is profitable for Amazon b.c. And for free and for Fox Here's the perfect consumer product for the news because he's in a raging entertaining crazy and you can't eat he says something new every 2 seconds so he have to keep checking. And it's it's I think it's been terrible for the press this idea that we're going to cover him so much. And to the exclusion of all else and I think it's really radicalized audience behavior to. What do you think is driving that is that the profitability of it I mean one can point to how Trump plays his opponents plays the media that while it may seem like he is setting himself up for criticism Trump controls the narrative and that can be repeated over and over again so is it enough just to say well look the mainstream media including the respectable media is being played by Trump or are they really very conscious about the role that he plays for that I think they're very conscious of it I think certainly the at the level of television executives they're very conscious of that and I know I don't have any evidence for those but I can imagine that there aren't discussions that you know that this is great just keep doing what you're doing I mean you're the c.n.n. Made a 1000000000 dollars Trump's 1st year in office there the coverage strategy was all trump all the time all Russia good all the time that was a story that sold and sold and sold and and again this is this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of the interview which is reporters only to be told what works and what doesn't. We hear a loud and clear what they want and what they don't want at the editor editorial level and everybody knew that you know that everybody knows that Trump is a sexy story if you have an angle on Trump it's going to be waved through and just to take an example the the the operation with Al Baghdadi. When that happened instantaneously there were like 9 different angles to the story that were just trump Related How did this work for Trump was Trump overplaying his hand did he inform the Democrats early enough that was it what was the The Situation Room photo more stage than Obama's was I mean there it was it was to the point of absurdity but all the all that content gets clicks so and we're we're doing that to the exclusion of. Well who was Al back to you why was that important how is he going to change the history going forward where people in the region think we're not doing that traditional stuff we're doing it all on this other angle and I think that we know what we're doing let me ask you more particularly about the media that positions itself as progressive or even left how do you see the role of progressive media outlets in both in the short term peeling from surprise but being implicated in this turn of media to sensationalism and fostering often unproductive divisions again 1st of all I think the stations that market themselves as left or progressive we have to remember that that's 1st a marketing distinction and not necessarily a real distinction like if you look at m s n b c. Or the New York Times even less so the times but booklet was taken as embassy for example you can go a long time without some seeing somebody who is genuinely anti-war on a name as n.b.c. Panel but you'll won't have to go far to see. You know a current or former intelligence official or a military officer. There the kind of a new liberal think tanks and ex-military people there just for you know it's some more situation to what was going on in the early 2000 when we were going into Iraq there was this explosion of people from a certain sector of society that were just flooding all the cable channels and we're seeing are now seeing them as I'm you see there's just a lot of people from that particular corner of the universe who are now paid contributors and they're talking about stories that they themselves have involvement in which is crazy. But they market themselves to the progressive thing they do a few stories that I would say superficially address things that are important to. To progressives and liberals but it's not it's never to the point of being offensive to big pharmaceutical companies it's it's you have to I think people have to realize that there's a little bit of a con going on with some of that they're trying to keep they're trying to hook you on on certain issues by being a very very against people who like like with all Trump but that doesn't mean that they're for the same things that you are so you know I really worry about that I mean that's part of the reason that I wrote the book is that. The same kind of things we started to see Fox doing in the ninety's that I thought were really bad we're now seeing on the other side with world where they're manipulating audiences and not enough and informing them less you write in Haitink I should say I'm speaking with journalist Matt tell you be about his book hate in quite today's media makes us despise one another and I'm Sasha and this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio but you write about how how the media both progressive or liberal media or right wing media or mainstream media has over the past several decades been fostering greater and greater division in society and often that those divisions that whole process to seem pointless although you conclude that maybe it's not but clearly there are real divisions in society I'm some very very stark divisions I mean wealth inequality is one of the most obvious that springs to mind how do you contrast the coverage of those sort of structural divisions within society with the kind of push to create conflicts create what seem like debates and oppositional clashes on television or within the media system that's a great question I think the. If you were going to have television that was reflected the actual divide in society and I actually wrote a book called The divide and the. Real if you had it really I think for instance Occupy Wall Street had an accurate take on what the actual divisions were in society with those 99 percent in the one percent it's rich versus poor Right that's probably the more accurate description of what's going on in America there are a few people who have tons of money there's a huge pool of everybody else and who have similar problems they may have different social viewpoints but that grouping is very very significant You never see the represented in in a commercial news they instead are showing you a representation of reality that allegedly shows basically America divided up into haves into red and blue right where we're we're divided along this stark line that has to do with our views on things like abortion or climate change or whatever it is but they very seldom talk about our economic differences or or the the gap between big corporate power in this country and the sort of large class that everybody else who's was the economic security so what I worry about with the press is like the crossfire representation of America which is this cartoon as the. Representation of political conflict in this country and there's no pretense with shows like Crossfire was that this is anything but basically the political version of sports it's just you know into people arguing about something on the whole concept is that one person wins the other person doesn't and we're supposed to root for one side not the other and it's a consumer experience for watching it the same we watch football that's not what politics though it's all bases is real and it's about. You know very very serious issues. Who gets what and who controls the political processes and who was who has power and who doesn't and I think it's I think we're just in accurately portraying those differences on television I think people are getting in on a healthy and inaccurate view of of where the divisions really lay. Well let me ask you about your reflections on your own work and the role that you've played as a bestselling journal as somebody who is celebrated within liberal and progressive spheres of politics how do you looking back see the role that you have played in this kind of turn toward hyper partisan and cartoonish sometimes critiques that really missed the bigger picture Yeah that's a great question and I definitely talk about that in the book this is one of the reasons why I started writing about this because I was that was uncomfortable about my own role in this stuff I mean you have to think about it I lived overseas for a long time when I came home to the States from Russia in 2002 I remember going to a bookstore and going to the politics section and there were 2 shelves there was basically the Democrats Democrat politic books in the Republican politics books I thought to myself wow in order to write a book in this country you have to basically forego half the audience off the bat and I thought that's so strange there's no books for everybody but that becomes part of your identity if you're in this if you're in the media you have to pick a side and you have to choose to be marketed as one of the other or else you can't benefit from the sort of gigantic. You know messaging process that helps people sell books and solves all their their work. And so I've kind of grown up within the liberal side the the progressive side. And. I worried about that throughout because I was a writer you don't want to turn off everybody you want to be able to address everybody. And you know I was. In both for the magazine and in my books I always had to be conscious of the fact that most of my audience was coming from one place not the other and you know. Inevitably you start kind of playing to your audience a little bit too much and I think the being out of the how bit of trying to reach everybody is not healthy for church journalists I think it's and now when it's not just being a little bit divided now we actively say that you should never go on Fox News you should never even acknowledge the legitimacy of that other audience. I think it's very bad for us because it takes us out of the discipline of challenging our assumptions and so you know what I did always try to push back a little bit and you know cover. Potentially what the Democrats are doing wrong like I covered the financial services industry for a long time I tried to write about their role in the financial crisis but it's become very difficult now now really most most of what we do in the media business is write about how one side or the other is bad or not and I don't think that's healthy do you think that the structures of journalism often also don't lend themselves toward complexity Oh yeah and including the kind of journalistic tradition that you come out of I mean that kind of pungent tradition of take no prisoners rights very very colorful and yet obviously that complexity the complexity of institutions or structures often doesn't lend itself easily to that kind of writing you know and that's absolutely true. Again I spent probably 10 years writing about. Wall Street and stuff like how the financial crisis happened I was surprised mortgage crisis happened what was what were credit default swaps What were the what were collateralized debt obligations these are incredibly boring arcane complex topics well why did Lehman Brothers collapse it's you have to it's tons of legal leaves and and jargon so what I tried to do in my. Work was I would use all of the sort of fiction writing techniques color all those things try to sell the complexity and it's so it's a challenge you you're trying to use the rhetoric to get people to take a journey they wouldn't otherwise take however the the format of journalism is really rather lend itself to that and I was lucky to get a lot of space and you know to do $67000.00 were articles about this or that but most people don't have that most people who work in the business if you work in t.v. You get 7 sentences to do a story about whatever it is and that's just not enough time to explain anything that matters in this country and the unfortunate fact is that probably 95 percent of the content that we produce in the news business is just little bits of things that people see headlines or short. Short articles or t.v. Episodes. That can only scratched the surface and that you inevitably we get a cartoon version of reality because we're not we're not looking at as you say institutions are almost excluded from reporting because it's just too hard to talk about the Fed or the talk about. You know how the e.p.a. Works or whatever it is. People people just want to have a hot take and then they want to move on to well watching whatever else is they're watching that I think that's a very very bad for us do you think that the demise of the long form is part of this I mean I feel very grateful to be able to broadcast on a program that is a long form program but that's really unusual it is media and the same is true with in writing and people are reading way fewer books and have turned to shorter pieces of course you could argue about what drove that in the 1st place well you know there are so many factors that are right I mean a lot of it has to do which is the way people are raised now they are watching more . Or video there there. Even the way we watch video is different than it used to be used to sit down turn on the television leave the channel on for and watch it for a long time now people are scanning constantly they don't like it they move to something else immediately so they don't have the attention span to even watch long documentaries for let alone read a book so that's something you have to be conscious of when you're when I'm writing No I know there's no you know 3 paragraphs run away to the topic you have to get them in the 1st sentence or else they're not going to they're not going to keep reading and that's that's tough you know especially again if you if you have to work your way back to the to the core concept which is that most political problems in this country are boring and difficult and institutional How do you get an audience that is just not trained to deal with that to tools to look at those things and that's that's very difficult these days as you say you you have an opportunity to do you know a 50 minute show most reporters don't don't have that and that's that's unfortunate you know I don't know how we get back to that. I want to ask you about how you see the kind of disillusionment you referred to earlier within the public at large you said that while people are consuming more and more media they trust at last and last a real paradox there we spoke earlier about Noam Chomsky and that word Herman's book Manufacturing Consent which is sort of a theme that runs through your book even talk to him for us and then there's an interview with Chomsky included and in the book and for a lot of people who are having a gauge somewhat with manufacturing consent they might conclude that a mistrust of the media is a good thing because the media is telling us lies you argue though that that's a misreading of Trump skin Herman what do you think we should conclude about how we should relate to the media. It's not a great question Chomsky talks about this actually he he actually said one of the things that he feels about manufacturing he said and it's clearly he's very proud of the book as it should be but he's concerned that people drew the conclusion that the media's not to be trusted. You know from from reading that book and I think what he was trying to say more is that people have to be more discerning about what they read they have to be more educated about it and and you know as he as he put it newspapers are full of facts. I think even the worst news organizations for the most part try to avoid being openly factually wrong like they're they're still trying to avoid libel suits or trying to avoid slander all these other things that we used to try to to not get ourselves caught in but you just have to be able you have to be aware of what you're reading and what the context of those facts are and you have to look out for whether they're being presented in an even handed way whether they're trying to push you towards one conclusion or another that doesn't mean you should ignore entirely and dismiss everything and go go read a conspiratorial site it just means that you know that there are things that you have to be aware of in the same way that you should be when you go to McDonald's I mean you know that are you going to eat that 2nd hamburger maybe not it's not a good idea so it's it's it's a difficult thing I mean I don't I don't know how we fix the media but I don't think just completely tuning it out and giving up on trying to know what's going on in the world is the right solution either so that's I mean that's what he was trying to say things. That tell you he is my guest he is the author of hate and why today's media makes us despise one another as published by or books and he's a correspondent for Rolling Stone I'm Sasha and this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio So it's very hard to escape the media even if we want. In a particularly in this extended electoral season that we find ourselves in right now and I wanted to get your take on how you feel people should try and navigate that I mean you've written a lot about the 26000 elections and the role the media played in fueling Trump's rise but also in some ways I don't know if this is a word you would use but sort of demobilizing the public and some sense how do you feel like people should try and make their way through the months ahead of us I think the public is already. Had a lot of awareness there is this come to a lot of realizations about how presidential elections are covered and it was one of the main takeaways from 2016 is that you saw these wide scale revolts against quote unquote establishment candidates on both sides. You would never have seen Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders getting that share of of the vote in 2004 there in the Nader of these candidates were what we what the campaign press would call presidential right like the I covered I started covering presidential campaigns in 2004 and one of the 1st things I say. I really live focused on was the role of the campaign press and shaping how people thought about presidential candidates and and it was really it was it was really a very closed bubble like kind of priesthood of people who spent too much time with one another these are Washington and New Yorkers spawn and Sue who had an idea of who got to be president who didn't and they spent a lot of their time telling audiences who was a good candidate who was a bad can't they use all these code words right they would say so and so other looks or doesn't look presidential So one person is nuance the other person is pointed but pointed as bad. To. To profit sort all that was another thing was bad so that they were constantly saying that. Trying to push us towards their conception of what a presidential candidate was not how we ended up with people like John Kerry who was who sort of fit the dictionary definition of what what reporters thought a presidential candidate looked like he is tall white athletic you know through football around the tarmac with all the reporters love that but at the same time they call people like Dennis Kucinich who you know really try to intellectually engage people in the campaign. They call him a kook and an eccentric and all these things were disqualifying always saw in 2016 is that just voters stop listening to that stuff they we told them over and over again and I say we as in the campaign press that Donald Trump was an inappropriate choice but so was Bernie Sanders we told we were the press repeatedly said that this was not a serious person and they kept the following his pronouncements so. I think it's not the public that needs to be educated about how to go for I think it's the news media just hasn't figured out yet that they're having a negative impact like when they move they're constantly trying to tell us how to think about things still and they don't realize that people are actually responding negatively to that you know we switch in this for the session of the Democratic candidates that they get they tried to push in certain ways and I just don't think I think there's that there's a gap there and a disconnect that they that hasn't been fixed in 2016 but one of the reasons that they didn't see Donald Trump coming is because we were the press was spending too much time both with each other and with the candidates and so they were getting all their information from pollsters and from from other pundits and they don't realize that you know there was this whole world out there that they were listening to and I don't think they've done it that's changed enough going forward do you think the way elections are decided has changed you point out that we are told by the media you choose you know it's up to the people the people decide then there are those who point to a late shaping the choices that we have on offer in the way we take those choices how do you see it and did Donald Trump end that his election you know I think he totally did I think if the formula in the past was was really specific and pretty pretty conservative you had to have the campaign press a whole bunch of sort of a war chest of core. For donors behind you and the backing of the party structure if you had all those 3 things in alignment you were probably going to win the nomination and that was a tried and true formula that just hadn't been broken for you know decades ago and going into the last election with all from came in and he didn't really any of those things here he raised half as much money as Hillary Clinton did he you know I think it was 2 endorsements from later newspapers as opposed to something like 99 for for Hillary and you didn't really have the full fledged backing of the Republican Party there was there was a serious problem there like the r. And c. Was holding back its volunteers at one point they were advertising as much and yet he want I mean a huge point he won with less of the popular vote but it shows that you can break that cycle and so this is to me is that that's the big story of 2016 and you saw some more thing almost happen in the Democratic side with with the Sanders campaign and yeah I think it's changed I mean I think the used to have we still talk about the invisible primary and it's nothing I write about in the book is that reporters even used to celebrate it we would align all those forces ahead of time and whoever got all that Ally and was going to be the nominee well that didn't happen last time we the Jeb Bush won the invisible primary and got 3 delegates so. It's it's it's different now I don't know how to describe it but it's different than it used to be do you think that operates the same way on the Democratic side of it I mean Bernie Sanders obviously got a great deal of popular support and yet he didn't become the candidate and the d.n.c. Was certainly not pro him do you think there are more constraints in terms of someone being able to make it coming from the left there are Bernie also has you know a serious problem with. With the press. And there's it's not really a secret that the the big commercial media outlets don't particularly like Bernie Sanders and they're not giving him the same kind of coverage that they would give other candidates the the you know there's sort of almost comically at this point of voiding any kind of indication that he's doing well in the polls or anything it is it's absurd at this point and you know he was the leading fund raiser last quarter which would normally be a big headline if it was for a candidate that you know was more approved of traditionally And but you know you don't hear a lot about it so he has he has a lot of obstacles with the audiences of papers like The New York Times The Washington Post c.n.n. Anderson b.c. Because those are Democratic voters for the most part so it's tough to overcome that I think that's it's different from you know Donald Trump sort of circumventing the traditional media process and also he had lots of kind of friends in the media who liked him for reasons that didn't have a whole lot to do with politics and he schmoozed people you know even I chose Scarborough wasn't really a Republican Jamaican Joe originally they just kind of liked having Trump on set he got a lot of coverage that way and also there was a point at which I think Republicans have tuned out there on the right wing media. A little more than I think Democrats have at this point like that there are there were a little bit kind of side I Fox News by the time Trump came around already and being less wasn't busy as they were what what they were told People like to Jeb Bush then than the then I think Democrats are now you know I think there's there's still a little bit of a. There's there's still a bond there were Democrats and these big meaty organizations that it's tough to break. Well I'm afraid we're out of time now Tevi thank you so much well thank you so much Josh. He is a correspondent for Rolling Stone he is the author of many bestselling books including Insane Clown president and he's the author of hate Inc why today's media makes us despise one another which is published by or books if you go to against the grain dot org find a link to that book you've been listening to against the grain I'm social living Thanks for listening and please tune in again next time. Against the Grain is produced by Sasha the Lee and c.s. Song plays visit us online at against the grain aware Well you'll find on demand and downloadable audio and a way to sign up for our podcast and you can check us out on Facebook at against the grain radio or follow us on Twitter or radio against. Justice for Some law and the question of Palestine that's the title of the road out across your book Out of Practice the leader of students for justice in Palestine at u.c. Berkeley and now is a nationally known human rights lawyer and professor should be talking about her new book on Tuesday November 12th 7 pm at Berkeley City College 20050. Center Street Bush will also be in conversation with a lot of his want to director of the Arab resource an organizing center. North communicates with the skill of a lawyer and the passion of an activist the event is a benefit for the Middle East Children's Alliance and is wheelchair accessible call 51080542 go to America or. We're undergoing a nasty new surge of personal and institutional violence against women something very like new which haunts the surge is happening within the global expansion of capitalism to clarify and combat it Sylvia Federici Italian writer feminist co-founder of the international feminist collective is coming to the Bay prison her latest book which is witch hunting and women at co-sponsor St John's Presbyterian Church 2727 College Avenue in Berkeley Thursday evening December 5th starting 730 writer saw Surely if k.p. a Phase against the grain will converse with Sylvia Federici escapee if a benefit has wheelchair access tickets available at brown paper tickets dot com and many in the East Bay bookstores for this feminist call to arms. They're listening to 94 point one k. P.f.a. 89.3. 88 point one k. I have c.f. In Fresno and on line i k p s fate dot org. No question I was way to have you up on the conscience of 20th century man and the question of how to direct his own genius the other vision of mankind without unintentionally committing soft destruction.