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| Home Front: Politix |
| What, me worry? Bush abandons the Alfred E. Neuman school of PR |
| 2005-12-02 |
| The Bush administration has underestimated the changed nature of modern media. The mainstream media alone is not the problem. All these political subjects--the war, immigration--get discussed at length, all the time, on talk shows and across the great expanses of the Web wilderness. In this new environment, the emotional content has become stronger and even more important than the facts, such as they are. The facts have been demoted. What's more, the language, the very vocabulary of all these conversations, has been ramped way up. Shrillness has monetary value now, and it has political value. If this were traditional spin, as the White House assumes, it wouldn't matter. But in our time the spin has become a vortex. The leading exploiter of this phenomenon is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Despite the comparatively minimal numbers killed, his suicide bombers and car bombs have dispirited even normally clear-eyed supporters of the war effort and its purpose. Conservative columnists go from support for Iraq to advocating withdrawal and back to support depending on mood swings. Iraq has become simply "the violence." But if "the violence" has displaced the rest of reality, then the Bush model of ignoring the spin isn't viable. The result is John Murtha. By not seeing that the spin is now a vortex, the White House let it suck down the president's support to a level that threatens his ability to govern. Past need not be prologue. Under the old model, Mr. Bush nominated Harriet Miers and let the world scream. But there is a crucial difference between not caring what the MSM thinks and not listening to one's own party. Mr. Bush heard and changed the nomination. A legendary stubbornness, apparently, will not beget self-destruction. Now we have the Iraq counteroffensive in the opinion wars. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times followed the Annapolis speech with refutation articles (amusingly titled "Fact Check" in the Times). Fine. Now the MSM is reacting to the president's agenda rather than shaping it. So far nearly all the recent addresses by Messrs. Bush and Cheney have been in front of military audiences or applause-prone conservative groups. The Green Zone is in Baghdad, not in the U.S. In the 2004 campaign Karl Rove sent Mr. Bush into an undiscovered America of right-leaning exurbs and edge cities such as Clermont County, east of Cincinnati. This is the real Bush base. The president should revisit it, to explain in person what he told the Middies at Annapolis--why he has taken them to Iraq and why we intend to see this through to an honorable victory. |
| Posted by:Whomoth Spoluse9846 |
| #1 New York Times followed the Annapolis speech with refutation articles (amusingly titled "Fact Check" in the Times). CNN had a piece that was nearly identical. I watched it to see what they were fact checking, but the accusations were lame so I turned the channel. This guy is right. The president needs to get out in front more. The MSM has been discredited by anyone who is paying atttention. I'm to the point where I'm more apt to believe the kernel of truth in the Enquirer's headline on Brittany than I am to believe the kernel of truth in the headline of the NYT or WaPO. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-12-02 12:44 |