Quotes from Matt Taibbi

Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the "folk devil" of the moment. A perfect partnership.

This is the hallmark of the moral panic scenario. It's a real story, but it's exaggerated, often wildly, and comes wrapped in proposals for authoritarian solutions.

The whole "electability" question usually implies a) there's a candidate in this field who's most likely to win, and b) there's a candidate who appeals to you on a policy level, and c) those candidates are not the same person.

Content is designed not just to be lurid and sensational, but immediately disquieting from a psychological standpoint. You're meant to see something in the first flash that upsets you to the point of needing to hang in at least until mental balance is restored.

The amount of new lending was mind-boggling: between 2003 and 2005, outstanding mortgage debt in America grew by $3.7 trillion, which was roughly equal to the entire value of all American real estate in the year 1990 ($3.8 trillion). In other words, Americans in just two years had borrowed the equivalent of two hundred years' worth of savings.

As I would later discover in my own career, there are a lot of C-minus brains in the journalism business. A kind of groupthink is developed that permeates the upper levels of media organizations, and they send unconscious signals down the ranks.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections

In the social media age, we can scare you as never before. Which means politicians will have an easier time obtaining permission for censorship, surveillance, immigration bans, and other expanded powers.

The easiest way to predict what kinds of "electability" stories you'll see in an election season is to look at the field of candidates and see which ones have a lot of lobbying and ad money behind them. Those candidates will be described as electable. Everyone else will get the "polls say" treatment.

The news is an addictive product. Like cigarettes, this product can have a profound negative impact on your health. Almost without exception it will make you lonelier, more anxious, more distrustful of others, and more depressed.

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it.

The time to start worrying about the consequences of our editorial decisions was before we raised a generation of people who get all of their information from television, and who believe that the solution to every problem is simple enough that you can find it before the 21 minutes of the sitcom are over. Or

The news was once a placid ritual designed to amp down the viewer's political reflex.

But the steep drop in violent crime presented police with a problem. If making arrests is the only way to advance in your career, but crime is dropping, what do you do? Furthermore, what to do if the only way to make a living wage is to rack up as much overtime as possible?

As for the rest of them, God help us. Trump's continued success puts the onus on the field to try to out-crazy the frontrunner.

We fumbled "Why do they hate us?" badly after 9/11, when us was guiltless America and they were Muslims in the corrupt Middle Eastern petro-states we supported.

We made a joke of it during the Occupy protests, when "Why are they so angry?" somehow became a common news feature assignment after a fraud-ridden financial services sector put millions in foreclosure and vaporized as much as 40 percent of the world's wealth. More recently, we've cycled through a series of unconvincing responses to Why do they hate us?—themed stories like Brexit, the Bernie Sanders primary run of 2016, and the election of Donald Trump.

An oft-cited Gallup poll taken just after the 2016 election showed just 20 percent of Americans expressed "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers. An 80 percent no-confidence vote would be cause for concern in most professions.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski should be herded into a rocket and shot into space for their brown-nosing of Trump A

Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.

The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once "reputable" outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

For aiding and abetting drug cartels suspected in more than twenty thousand murders, groups famous for creating the world's most gruesome torture videos—the Sinaloa Cartel in particular, with its style of high-volume reprisal killings and public chainsawings and disembowelings, makes al-Qaeda look like the Peace Corps—HSBC got a walk. Tory Marone, for smoking their product and passing out on a park bench, got sent to jail.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out.

It's hard to overstate how utterly mad it is for a Fed chairman in the age of the global economy to claim that a weak currency only affects tourists. It's a little bit like saying a forest fire only really sucks if you're a woodpecker.