“If you’re constantly winding up audiences and telling them that all of their troubles are a result of this other group that is literally Hitler, that they’re literally Nazis, they’re literally Stalin, sooner or later some people are going to start picking up weapons and do something crazy,” Taibbi said. “This is why people are correctly upset about Fox News. But they should also be concerned about other forms of media. The formula is similar across the board.”

“Our system of bubble economics is going to produce some kind of a catastrophe at some point,” Taibbi, the author of one of the finest books on the 2008 financial crash, “Griftopia,” concluded. “At which point, if you tell people often enough that their next-door neighbor is literally in the league with Nazis or terrorists or whatever it is—of course Fox pioneered this, going back to the Iraq War, when we were told liberals were terrorist supporters—sooner or later, there’s going to be violence. The inability of society to agree on a common set of facts means the media has failed already. It means we’re just not reaching people. [In this atmosphere] we will never be able to work things out in a civil way.”

via The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate | The Smirking Chimp