I’ve recently been enjoying Matt Taibbi’s Substack posts as well as Useful Idiots, his Rolling Stone podcast with Katie Halper.

In a recent discussion with Thomas Chatterton Williams, Matt made a comment that made me think of a new perspective (at least to me) about how twitter and other social media might contribute to bitter and resentful feelings, particularly toward journalists and other major media figures. They were talking about the increasingly common ad hominem attacks used in place of thoughtful disagreement over ideas. At one point, Matt mocked the personal attacks, saying something along the lines of:

“Yeah, but I mean, she sucks.”

For some reason this got me thinking … is a key part of this problem that journalists are increasingly visible as people and not just reporters? The fact that his hypothetical twitter user could think he could sum up a person with whom he disagrees with such a succint phrase is a problem. David Frum, for instance, isn’t just a name on an article, he’s now a person with views and perspectives that I can agree or disagree with. I can see him on Twitter and learn what he likes or doesn’t like. I can watch interviews with him and learn about his background. And of course, that’s now true for everyone in the media. It’s like we have too much access–in the “good old days,” the news felt like it was, well not exactly objective, but at least the perspective of an organization. Now, journalists feel more like people we know, some of whom we may like and others we despise. Their exposure gives us a less monolithic account of the world.

Under this theory, it’s not just the quick tit-for-tat rhythm and mob pile-ons of twitter that makes it so poisonous. It’s that twitter and other social media give us too much information about the people behind the reporting the news. And sometimes we can’t look past the people for long enough to actually discuss the ideas.