An excerpt of Hate Inc. in A Public Seminar

Commercial media has always been sensationalistic. We were never not encouraged to aim content at your outrage center. We were always eyeball-hunting.

I know this because I was hired to do this work, over and over. My commercial niche, in fact, was the vitriolic essay that got people spitting mad, or poked fun at someone audiences hated.

I was the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog of journalism. I actually won the National Magazine Award for commentary, the highest award you can get in the magazine business, for a Rolling Stone article about Mike Huckabee called “My Favorite Nut Job” that called the Arkansas governor a “Christian goofball of the highest order” who resembled an “oversized Muppet.” There is and was great demand in the business for “takedown artists,” provided you’re taking down the right people.

Read the full excerpt here.