Dems in Trouble. Will US Turn into a One Party State?

It has not been shown that the contents of the document were false. Bush
has yet to explain where he was during most of his statiioning in the Alabama National Guard so that he could avoid serving in Vietnam.

 

It's the Media, Stupid!

By Robert Parry
January 5, 2005

America’s top political analysts are now mining Election 2004 for lessons learned: A front-page story in the Washington Post marveled at how effective the Swift boat smears were against John Kerry for the bargain price of $546,000. Columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. observes that “the sheer negative genius of the Bush campaign is worthy of close study.”

While both points may be true, they obscure a larger reality: The reason that negative attacks could work so well for the Bush campaign was the preexistence of a vast conservative media infrastructure that serves as both an echo chamber for Republican messages and a way to protect George W. Bush and other Republicans from attack.

Indeed, the conservative investment of tens of billions of dollars in media over the past quarter century may be the biggest – and least reported – money-in-politics story of modern American history. The conservatives’ ability to saturate the airwaves with their version of reality has changed how millions of Americans understand the world.

So, even when the Democrats can roughly match the Republicans in election fundraising – as occurred in 2004 with each side spending about $1 billion – the Republicans have a huge, built-in advantage because the conservative media reinforces their messages. This infrastructure also works between elections – day-in-day-out, year-in-year-out – to keep the Republican base engaged and the Democrats on the defensive.



Despite the experiences of the Clinton “scandals,” Gore’s embattled candidacy of 2000 and the generally gentle press treatment of George W. Bush, the Democrats seemed to expect that some cyclical pattern would assert itself shifting the news media back into balance....



But even as Clinton impeachment battle of 1998-99 merged into the Gore recount disaster of 2000, Establishment liberals and the Democratic leadership turned a deaf ear to a rising chorus of grassroots alarm about the need for a media infrastructure to counteract the conservative echo chamber.

Instead the Democrats opted for another model, trying to match the Republicans in fundraising for the presidential election. With the help of unprecedented sums raised in small donations on the Internet, the Democrats did nearly match the Republicans in money spent on the presidential race, $1.14 billion for Republicans and $1.08 billion by Democrats, according to a Washington Post analysis.


The Swift boat lies succeeded in tarring Kerry as a phony because there was no comparable liberal media infrastructure to make the case that the smear was just the latest example of a pro-Bush dirty trick. [For more on the Swift boat case, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bushes Play the ‘Traitor’ Card” and “Reality on the Ballot.”]

Negativity

In his election analysis, columnist E.J. Dionne takes note of the effectiveness of Bush’s negative campaign strategy but also misses the media’s role.

“President Bush won reelection by ignoring the conventional wisdom that vicious attacks on your opponent don’t work and turn off voters,” Dionne wrote. “As soon as John Kerry won the Democratic nomination, Bush’s campaign went on the attack and never stopped. It worked.” [Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2004]

But it worked because the conservative media infrastructure could be counted on to promote the attack lines, and much of the mainstream media could be expected to do what it’s done for years now – fall in line with the brash conservatives as they define what the story is.

When liberals did criticize Bush and his policies, both the conservative and mainstream media framed the attacks as a Bush “hate-fest.” Liberals – from documentary producer Michael Moore to comedian Whoopi Goldberg – were called on the carpet for supposed “Bush-bashing.”

In summer 2004, the media drumbeat about the anticipated Bush “hate-fest” grew so loud that Kerry’s advisers began deleting criticisms of Bush from Democratic convention speeches. The keynote address by Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama didn’t even mention Bush’s name.

By contrast, the Republicans unleashed an anti-Kerry “hate-fest” at the GOP convention, which included Sen. Zell Miller’s bitter denunciation of the Democratic candidate, while Bush delegates sported Purple Heart band-aids to mock Kerry’s war wounds. Neither the conservative media nor the mainstream media termed the Republican convention a “hate-fest,” however

What Campaign 2004 proved was that this political imbalance cannot be corrected simply by matching the Republicans in campaign fundraising.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/010505.html

 

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