On the Crime Beat

Matt Taibbi, discussing crime reporting in his book Hate, Inc., remarked that part of the media's strategy for keeping people coming back is letting them feel "superior" to the "vile" people they present. Hence, for example, the sorts of persons one sees in the crime news, especially of the lighter type where the crimes come across as idiotic rather than frightening or disturbing (as with their tales of assorted "Florida men").

The implication of Taibbi's remark is that the media avoids making the reader or viewer--especially the reader or viewer in its target, upper middle class audience (for that is who it pays to pander to, today as in Veblen's time)--feel "inferior" to others.

However, it seems to me that the media is actually rather relentless about making its audience, and not just the working class persons who also consume this garbage, but that more privileged target audience, feel inferior.

It just does it in a different way, for different reasons, than he is concerned with.

Specifically that media is relentless about making its audience feel inferior to the rich and powerful and famous, and to those closest to them; to people who have had the advantages of a privileged upbringing, and the high office to which it easily leads, and who have been invested with "authority" in some area; to, above all, the Chief Executive Officers and the billionaires they hasten to call "geniuses" based on no evidence whatsoever besides their having an impressive-sounding title or (allegedly) lots of money, the way they did with Jeffrey Epstein in a truly characteristic display not only of their propensity to grovel before the elite, but their extreme stupidity.

In short, they make their audience look up to the super-rich power elite, and their courtiers, but look down on working class people--the sense of superiority to the latter not unimportant, but the thing not to be forgotten the affirmation of social hierarchy and its associated value system, which they do ceaselessly and unquestioningly.

Yet faced with this people speak of this as the ""liberal" and even "left" media--proving that they do not even know the meaning of those terms.