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Credit where it's due

What Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc. got right about the news

In 2019, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote one of the clearest explanations of why modern news feels the way it does. The book is called Hate Inc. — and a lot of why The Harold exists is a direct answer to what it lays out. Here's what Taibbi exposed, and why we built Harold to be its opposite.

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The short version: Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc. argues that modern commercial news isn't broken — it's working exactly as designed: built to sell your attention, flatten the world into two warring teams, and keep you angry at the other half of the country. We think he's right. The Harold is our attempt to build the opposite — subscriber-funded, side-free, outrage-free news, read to you in five calm minutes.

First, the credit: Matt Taibbi and Hate Inc.

Matt Taibbi is a longtime investigative journalist, best known for years of reporting on Wall Street and the 2008 financial crisis. In 2019 he published Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another — first as a serialized book online, then in print through OR Books.

It's one of our favorite books about the news, and it shaped how we think about this whole project. Taibbi consciously wrote it as an update of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent — but for an era of cable panels, algorithmic feeds, and outrage by subscription. If you only read one book about why the news feels exhausting, we'd point you to that one. What follows is our summary of the problems he named — so you can spot them yourself.

What Hate Inc. exposed

Taibbi's core, uncomfortable point is that the news isn't failing. The outrage, the division, the noise — none of it is a bug. It's the product working as intended. Five threads from the book stuck with us most:

You're not the customer — you're the product

Commercial news, Taibbi argues, isn't built first to inform you. It's built to capture your attention and sell it — to advertisers, and to the engagement metrics that set the whole industry's clock. And the most reliable way to hold attention, newsrooms learned, isn't accuracy or usefulness. It's emotion. Anger and fear keep you watching longer than calm ever could. So the incentive baked into the business model is, quietly, to keep you agitated.

The world gets flattened into two sides

Real life has more than two sides, and most stories are genuinely messy. But a binary, us-versus-them fight is simpler to package and far more addictive to follow. So modern news, Hate Inc. shows, sells reality as a permanent two-team conflict — red versus blue, good guys versus bad guys. The nuance gets cut, because nuance doesn't rate.

The news copied the sports broadcast

One of the book's sharpest observations: news has come to look a lot like sports television. There's the pre-game hype, the color commentary, the picking of winners and losers, the open rooting for a side. You're not really invited to think about a story — you're invited to cheer. The coverage's job becomes telling you who won, and who you should be mad at.

Hating the other side is the product

The title is the thesis. Outlets discovered they could build loyal, lucrative audiences by selling them a tribe — and, just as importantly, an enemy. Each side gets its own channel, flattering its viewers and demonizing the other half of the country. On a lot of channels, the hatred isn't a side effect of the news. It is the news.

Keeping you fighting keeps power comfortable

This is where Taibbi picks up Manufacturing Consent and updates it. The older trick was manufacturing agreement. The newer one is manufacturing division. As long as audiences are busy fighting their neighbors over culture-war headlines, the slower, more structural stories — about money, and power, and who actually benefits — get a much quieter ride.

Why this is bad for all of us

None of this would matter much if it were just annoying. It isn't. A media environment engineered around anger has real costs: it makes us trust each other less, it makes ordinary disagreements feel like existential threats, and it leaves people genuinely worse informed — full of feelings about the news, and short on the plain facts of it.

And it's a hard machine to escape, because it's profitable. The outrage gets rewarded with attention; the attention gets sold; the cycle pays for itself. Recognizing the playbook, the way Hate Inc. teaches you to, is the first step. Choosing news that isn't built on it is the second.

How The Harold is built to be the opposite

We didn't set out to argue with any one outlet. We set out to build a news product where the incentives Taibbi identified simply aren't present. Here's the playbook — and the deliberate opposite.

The Hate Inc. playbook

Built to provoke

Sell your attention to advertisers. Flatten the world into two sides. Root for a team. Keep you angry at the other half. Never let the story end.

The Harold

Built to inform, then stop

Funded only by subscribers. No sides, no team, no rooting. The spin and outrage stripped out. Five calm minutes, and you're done.

It's subscriber-funded, so the core incentive is gone. The Harold takes no advertising and no sponsorship — ever. Your subscription is the only thing paying for it. That one structural choice removes the engine Taibbi describes: there is no advertiser to please and no engagement metric to feed, so there's nothing rewarding us for winding you up. We answer to you, not to your attention span.

It refuses the two-sides frame. The Harold doesn't sort the news into red and blue. It reads 400+ sources from across the spectrum, cross-references what actually happened, and reports that — not who "won." Where credible sources genuinely disagree, it tells you both, plainly, instead of picking a team for you.

It doesn't do color commentary. There's no host take, no rooting, no verdict layered on top. Harold reports what happened and trusts you to decide what you think — the exact opposite of being told who to be mad at.

It's designed to end. A briefing is roughly five minutes long, and then it's over. It isn't an infinite feed engineered to keep you scrolling and reacting. You listen, you're caught up, you put the phone down and get on with your day.

That's the whole idea. Hate Inc. diagnoses a machine built on outrage and division. The Harold is our attempt at the cure: the calm, factual, side-free briefing the diagnosis points to.

A note on credit: everything above is our reading of Hate Inc., in our own words — not Matt Taibbi's. The Harold has no affiliation with him and isn't endorsed by him. We're simply admirers of the book, and we think you should read it for yourself.

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