Has we become a nation of haters? You might think so from what you see all around you. The alarming spread of hate has inspired everything from a proliferation of hate-crime laws to a Taylor Swift song and the bestselling novel-turned-movie The Hate U Give.
The more urgent question is: Why is this happening? I’ve heard all kinds of explanations: income inequality, hate-mongering politicians, what schools do (or don’t teach).
But those explanations tend to ignore a factor that modifies all the others: the upheavals in the media that have made it easier for them to spread the hate. I dig into how it all happened in my latest post at @Medium, which draws on my experiences as a journalist as well as several books on the subject, including the Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despite One Another. My conclusion, which you can read here, is that Taibbi has a point.
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