Media Snake Oil, the Series: What they did to Howard Dean.

I have been reading an interesting series of diaries at Political Cortex called Media Snake Oil. Part 1 is about Kucinich, and it is interesting. My interest lies with parts 2, 3, and 4. I am not familiar with the guy who wrote this series, Bill Hare. He does a good job, though.

Media Snake Oil: Why Dean Had to Go. Part Two of a Series.

Dean and his campaign team, led by veteran political consultant Joe Trippi, recognized and utilized the new growing power dimension of the Internet to draw into the political fold scores of individuals from America's cities and villages who had been previously distant viewers and now, through harnessing their actions cohesively behind a fiery and outspoken candidate, saw themselves as players.

The corporate elite and their highly paid lobbyists, political consultants and media propagandists immediately cried "foul" in that the process was not supposed to operate that way. Didn't these upstarts know that they were the professionals and opinion molders?

The nation was supposed to be controlled by them and these invaders from cyberspace were totally unwelcome. They were the loud guys holding the beer cans seeking to crash the private party of the tuxedo clad champagne crowd.

....The anti-Dean contingent was just getting warmed up. The trick was not to be consistent in labeling but consistent in attack. Just keep flooding the media with enough unsupported absurdity and hopefully, through sheer weight and volume, the message will sink through to enough of the gullible that Howard Dean has to go.

Now for Media Snake Oil Part 3:

Casting Dean as a Fanatic. Part Three of a Series

The ploy of casting Howard Dean as an elitist drew enough skeptics to make the corporate media decide to hedge their bets. After all, even if Dean had affluent roots his family wealth could not equal that of liberal Democratic presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

SO

A new ploy was adopted. Dean was unstable, too mean and aggressive to be president. To anyone completely uninformed about Dean one would expect, based on reports about him, that anyone straying into his path and looking at him cross-eyed risked being sent into instant traction by the Type A, macho and combative former Governor of Vermont.

.....What was it about Howard Dean that differentiated him from any other determined politician campaigning aggressively on behalf of a cause in which he believed? The critics never did provide an explanation; they just persisted with the same drone of Dean being combative, overly aggressive, hot-tempered, and un-presidential.

......There was a strong correlative reason behind focusing on the personal in seeking to dispose of Howard Dean as a viable presidential candidate. In the media's steady focus on Dean as a person the emphasis would be shifted away from the issues on which he was running for president.

In the first place, Dean represented a new kind of candidate with his committed legions of followers and his use of the Internet to generate funds. Should candidates be able to harness the Internet and link it to shrewd fund raising techniques the corporate elitists and their mobs of lobbyists would lose their monopoly.

There is a lot more good stuff, and painful stuff, in the 3rd part. But this is getting too long, so just a mention of the 4th in the series.

Media Snake Oil: Dean Portrayed as Screamer. Part Four of a Series.

When Dean with his populist message delivered from outside the orbit of the regular Democratic establishment began to resonate the media coined a name for his grassroots followers. They called them Deaniacs.

With labeling such an important and closely watched element in this technological era with its emphasis on spin control, users of the term surely recognized the similarity between the label Deaniac and that of maniac. It dovetailed with the image presented of an angry warrior eager to return to the wrestling mat he frequented years before in his school days.

.....The story that continued to be spun by the media remained Dean's perceived unelectability, which was repetitiously drummed into the public consciousness with the same determined ferocity as the replaying of his Des Moines speech. After he finished a distant third in Wisconsin on February 17, 2004, Dean ended his candidacy.

One of the most significant lessons to be learned in evaluating the Dean candidacy is the mainstream media's preoccupation with pinning the label of unelectable on grassroots, populist-oriented, perceived outsiders such as the Vermonter and Dennis Kucinich. The field was then clear for the triumph of a familiar establishment candidate, John Kerry.

This is long, and the four snips do not do it justice at all. But the amazing part is that we maniac Deaniacs are still around and so is he. Still waiting.



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