After nearly 30 years of conservative rule (yes, I'm including the DLC-dominated Clinton years) it would seem that we, our politicians, and our press all need remedial citizenshi[p courses. A case in point is the ease with which our infotainment-centered press can be bamboozled by a few buzz words, viz:
The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”
There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”
Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.
ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.
How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?
It's a good question. Basically, it's a scam.
“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”
David Seaman, a P.R. stunt planner and the author of a book to be published in October, “Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz,” is a proponent of “safe,” “easy” “secret,” “trick” and “breaking” because they suggest that something is new and fresh, he said.
Behind the buzz words,though, is the one nearly foolproof sales pitch: fear. Tell people there's something they should be afraid of and they'll gather round like moths to a flame. It didn't used to be like this. Fear has always been a powerful advertising strategy but there were others with just as strong a pull - hope, for instance. But selling hope these days is a long job. Selling fear after 30 years of conservative scare tactics is a piece o' cake.
Our press should be immune to this or at least resistant but in fact they get suckered like everybody else, not because they're stupid but because they're convinced that fear sells and that makes them gullible. When they aren't enabling stupidity because they believe it, they're selling it even though they don't. They are, in other words, easy targets for con artists and high-placed liars. Ask Joey Skaggs. He's been playing the press for over 40 years, scamming them relentlessly over and over and they still don't even know who he is.
We have to become less gullible, less vulnerable to cons and games and lies and tricks and deceit, because that is now the coin of the realm in the New Politics practiced by conservatives of both parties (assuming you're convinced we have two). Things have gotten so bad that University of Chicago School of Law Professor Geoffrey Stone thinks the president ought to have a "civil liberties adviser".
Presidents have a wide range of official advisers. There is a secretary of defense, a secretary of labor, a national security adviser, to name just a few. The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser. Within the highest councils of every administration there should be a respected public official whose charge it is to defend our civil liberties against all comers.
Can you imagine that being necessary before Reagan? Yet we have now reached a point in our devolution under conservatives when the one thing Democrats and Republicans can agree on is that the Fourth Amendment ought to be gutted to protect us from nearly imaginary enemies who blew their wad on a single operation and haven't threatened us in 7 years. We are ready to give up what makes America unique because we fear something that barely exists. It's a little like the whole country has turned into The Mouse Hunt.
My gawd. We need a civil rights advisor in the White House? Things are that bad?
Yes they are and it's partly our fault for being lazy, proud of our "innocence" and and protective of our ignorance. If we don't do better than this, we'll get what we deserve. Maybe we already have.
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