It’s an old and hackneyed saying that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on but it’s a saying that’s proven true most days, even more so in the digital age. Of course when you control the media it’s even easier: you can lie about your opponents with virtual impunity and there’s no-one to gainsay you.
The Right in the US has always known this. They’ve not exactly been secretive about their belief, fostered since before WWI by the father of modern political PR Edward Bernays, that control of message and political process is essential to the getting and holding of power. If your political grouping can take ownership of both message and process then it has cornered the market for political ideas, has become a monopoly supplier and can theoretically hold power in perpetuity.
Here’s Digby,with a topical example of how the US media, built as mouthpieces by those very corporations and individuals that have historically funded the political Right, is still, nearly a century later, controlling the message for its political masters by firing up the fake smear machine before elections have even begun:
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I know this is all boring, arcane history now, but it’s important to note that we are seeing similar stuff happening already with respect to various “deals” that are being reported in the press about Harry Reid and John Edwards. So far they are thin, nonsensical “exposes” written by one man, John Soloman, formerly of the AP and now of the Washington Post. Soloman is known to be a lazy reporter who happily takes “tips” from the wingnut noise machine and faithfully regurgitates them. He holds a very important position at the paper that was second only to the Times in its eagerness to swallow Ken Starr’s spin whole.
We are also seeing some similar reporting begin to emerge on Obama, much of it generated by hometown political rivals, just as we saw in the Clinton years. Today the LA Times implies that Obama is exaggerating his activist past. A couple of weeks ago we saw a truly egregiously misleading report on a deal he made to buy some land from a supporter.
These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?
The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90’s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power.
But it happened and it will happen again. They have learned nothing and feel they have nothing to answer for. Clinton’s spokesman is right when he says “I think that history demonstrates that whoever the nominee is is going to engender opposition from the right, and we will certainly be prepared” but it is only part of the story. All Democrats will also engender reporting from a press corps that persists in seeing politics through the lens of the rightwing narrative that was set forth by Scaife and his various hitmen back in the 1990’s.
1990’s? And the rest.
The narrative that was sketched out for the US Rght way back during the first world war by Bernays (who was also Sigmund Freud’s nephew) was one of expansionist, exceptionalist America-firstism and jingo, and entirely fictitious: it did not derive from the dreams or aspirations of US citizens but was created, just as any modern tv show or marketing strategy is.
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