This pox-on-both-their-houses screed from Taibbi (The Great Derangement) posits that the mainstream media stokes dopamine-pumping fury rather than reporting on depressing truths such as systemic inequality. Acknowledging that his book is "more confessional than academic study," Taibbi vents about what he believes are journalists' lazy assumptions, clichés, and elitism. One of his primary arguments--that TV news is a vast wasteland of stories that are at best trivial and at worst fuel anger about "someone else"--is powerfully and cogently rendered. Effectively skewering the tribal-panic approaches of both Fox's "rectum-faced blowhard" Sean Hannity and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, he inverts the old media dictum of Noam Chomsky (whom he interviews at length here) to "manufacturing discontent." A longtime campaign road reporter, Taibbi shares stories about how he sees journalists' vapid cynicism skewing election coverage by discussing vagaries like "electability" while studiously avoiding substantive talk about policy. Despite occasionally veering off his main thesis into less focused complaints, Taibbi incisively details how herd mentality led to media acceptance of the WMD narrative behind the Iraq War in 2003, and calls to task such reputable editors as Judith Miller from the New York Times, the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt, and the New Yorker's David Remnick. The result is a smart dissection of a grim media landscape. (Oct.)

For clarity, media"" here refers to the political reporters covering the savage, suffocating, unending U.S. presidential campaign cycle, and not the local press just trying to report on city-council proposals, regional business, crime, sports and the like a noble effort that gets tarred by the same brush used for cable news. Taibbi (I Can't Breathe, 2017), who covered the 2016 campaign season for Rolling Stone, makes a number of points that stick: reporters have often become unwitting props in the amped-up, WWE brand of politics practiced by Donald Trump, even as their organizations have profited mightily from it. Reporters have narrowed the bandwidth for what makes a worthy presidential candidate by asking irrelevant questions like: Would voters like to have a beer with candidate X? Most saliently, Taibbi cites the devastating global consequences of the press' failure to call the Bush administration's bluff on WMDs in the run-up to the Iraq War. He also makes the controversial, and probably premature, case that the media's assumptions in reporting on Russiagate are the modern-day equivalent of its WMD debacle. The news is a consumer product, Taibbi stresses, by way of explaining the marketplace in which the political press must operate. But, like some other consumer products food and medicine come to mind news is still essential to our health.--Alan Moores Copyright 2010 Booklist

Rolling Stone contributing editor Taibbi (I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, 2017, etc.) spares neither right- nor left-leaning pundits as he inveighs against cable TV and other media that treat news as a form of entertainment.After nearly three decades as a journalist, the author reconsiders the message of one of his earliest professional touchstones, Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, in which Chomsky argued that censorship in the United States wasn't overt but covertthat news companies simply failed to promote people who opposed their aims. Taibbi saw the self-censorship in newscasts that courted the widest possible audiences with a bland approach he sums up as, "Good evening, I'm Dan Rather, and my frontal lobes have been removed. Today in Libya." The explosion of cable news channels helped to change that, but the author argues convincingly that many outlets have traded one sin for another. Media companies now shunt viewers into "demographic silos" and treat news like pro wrestling, fomenting conflict by encouraging people to take sides. Prime examples include the Sean Hannity Show on Fox News and the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. "Maddow defenders will say she's nowhere near as vicious and deceptive as Hannity and therefore doesn't belong in the same category," writes Taibbi. "But she builds her audience the same way," by fostering an us vs. them mentality. This binary approach narrows debate, discourages the pursuit of complex stories, and leads journalists into blunders such as believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or implying that the Mueller Report might topple the president by the next commercial break. First published in online installments, this bookwhich ends with a spirited interview with Chomskyis less polished than recent works by Taibbi that arrived by a more traditional path. But his mordant wit is intact, and his message to journalists is apt and timely: Not everyone has to win a Pulitzer or Edward R. Murrow Award, but, please, have some pride.An invigorating polemic against tactics the news media use to manipulate and divide their audiences. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.