[TAML] GOPuppets
- From: Kevin Hopkins <kh2@xxxxxxxx>
- To: teamamiga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2006 15:09:00 -0600 (CST)
Media Occupation: For Election 2006 GOP Still Pulls Strings
From Media Post, November 3, 2006
By Tom Siebert
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?
fuseaction=Articles.san&s=50616&Nid=24799&p=380709
It’s less than a week before the climax of the most expensive campaign season
in the history of civilization and all the mainstream news media can talk about
is…John Kerry.
That’s right. Even the Pentagon realizes the Iraqi War is veering toward
total
chaos, the voting process may be hacked beyond repair by computerized polls
that don’t provide a paper trail and the White House continues to censor
scientists about global warming. Still, the past 48 hours of the news cycle
have
been devoted to discussions about a politician who isn’t even running for
office.
Forget whether the anti-charismatic John Kerry is a Skull & Bones blueblood
tool
or just another culturally tone-deaf, arrogantly entrenched member of
America’s
self-proclaimed political royalty. The bizarre spiral of events over the past
few
days is worth examining because it illuminates how the members of the right
wing media noise machine—let’s call them the GOPuppets—drive mainstream
news nowadays.
Last week, I mentioned the professional/partisan divide. It’s always easier
for
partisans to command the public mindshare because professionals feel
compelled to tell both sides of the story to reach the truth.
The partisan-professional divide is why the GOPuppets that make up the right-
wing circle jerk of Fox News/The Drudge Report/New York Post/Rush Limbaugh,
et. al., now drive the news cycle. And everybody else follows them. If Drudge
manufactures something salacious, the others merrily pile on. Whether it’s
true
or not, at some point, the rest of the news business joins in. It isn’t
always
guaranteed to work, but it often does—spectacularly—in the age of 24/7 news
coverage.
We’ve seen it again and again over the past couple of weeks. Michael J.
Fox’s
political commercial. That story took off when Limbaugh criticized him, in an
attempt to turn the debate, which, in turn, turned on him. Virginia Senatorial
candidate Jim Webb’s explicit novels—the George Allen campaign had been
shopping that story to the media for months—but until Drudge “broke” it,
nobody wrote about it. Once it was out there, Fox News and the New York Post
immediate began humping it like a rabid dog. It commanded the news cycle for
almost three full days.
That’s not counting how the GOPuppets provided an easy soapbox for defense
of the controversial television commercial attacking Tennessee candidate Harold
Ford, which exploited some of the most primitive racist sexual fears.
Of course, even the maestros of misinformation couldn’t spin any of those
stories to their favor. Ultimately. The “Kerry Klamity” (as the New York
Daily
News bannered Wednesday), was a slam dunk.
Eureka! The GOPuppets found an effective punching bag to turn the news cycle
their way. As of noon Thursday afternoon, the botched joke/insult to the troops
made the failed presidential candidate the No. 1 (John Kerry) and No. 5 (Kerry)
top searches on the Internet, according to Technorati.
Finally, one of the key continuing narratives from the GOPuppets is that
Democrats can’t lead. This misinformation mantra is why the American public
has heard very little about what the Democrats will do if they win the House
(or,
almost inconceivably, all of Congress) next Tuesday.
One month prior to Election Day, the much-vilified Democratic probable
Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi released a short list of six concrete, actionable
measures that Democrats would try to enact within the first 100 hours of their
takeover. It even had a simple, catchy, marketable name: “Six for ‘06.”
The six points sound like focus-group tested no-brainers: Create new rules to
break the link between lobbyists and legislation; enact all recommendations of
the 9/11 Commission; raise the minimum wage; halve student loan interest
rates; expand federally funded stem-cell research; allow the government to
negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for Medicare patients’ drugs.
Why do I mention these points? Because there’s been little reported about it
in
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
CNN, Fox News. The Times finally got around to mentioning it Monday, at the
end of a puffy Pelosi personality profile. USA Today did something similar,
three
weeks after Pelosi’s original announcement.
The GOPuppets on The Wall Street Journal editorial page even mock Pelosi for
not having a plan, contrasting her with Newt Gingrich and the “Contract With
America.” To their mild credit, the more ethical and honest real reporters at
the
WSJ did manage to make passing mention of a few of the six points, albeit
buried deep in two hard news stories.
The Washington Post, in an article that appeared three weeks after Pelosi’s
pronouncement, even noted how little attention had been paid to her points—
though that same article failed to mention a previous WP story that ripped
Pelosi’s political naiveté. Hey, maybe she is na’ve. Maybe this is just
warmed-
over rhetoric that rips off the Republicans. But Contract with America got
attention. Doesn’t Pelosi’s “Six for ‘06” deserve the same?
Camp Falcon: Last week, I wrote about the attack on Camp Falcon, one of the
largest ammunition dumps just outside Baghdad, where a number of American
troops were stationed. I was subsequently contacted by several people who
pointed me to several new sources of information about the attack, as well as
saying that one newslink about the attack that I suspected as propaganda, a
site
called “Jihad Unspun,” was just that. One source, though, insists it’s a
CIA-
created site for reverse propaganda.
Who knows? It’s totally down the rabbit hole with Alice when it comes to such
matters. The one thing I can tell you is that the mainstream media continues to
ignore what YouTube shows to be a series of massive and long-lasting
explosions. The only other (semi-) reputable place I can steer you is Wonkette,
which adds even more unsettling facts to the story.
---
Kevin Hopkins <kh2@xxxxxxxx>
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