Frank Rich's superb commentary on the Bush bubble...

[Sick_of_Rethuggery]

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but...

This is from Frank Rich's superb opinion piece in the NYT at
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/arts/10rich.html

<...>
To enforce the triumphalist narrative of these cinematic efforts, the Bush team had to cut out any skeptical press, or, as Mr. Bush once put it, "go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people" (as long as they're pre-selected). This didn't just mean avoiding press conferences and blackballing reporters from campaign planes. It also required an active program to demonize "the elite media" while feeding Fox News and its talk-radio and on-line amen chorus at every opportunity. "I end up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they're more accurate in my experience" is how Dick Cheney put it earlier this year. Thus the first Bush-Kerry debate was preceded by a three-installment interview with the president by Fox's Bill O'Reilly, whose idea of hard-hitting journalism is encapsulated in his boast that his was "the only national TV news program" to shield its viewers from pictures of Abu Ghraib. The highlight of his pre-debate Bush marathon was his expression of admiration for the president's guts in taking questions not submitted to him in advance. This is a "free press" in the same spirit as that championed by such Bush pals as Silvio Berlusconi, Crown Prince Abdullah, Pervez Musharraf, Ayad Allawi and, of course, dear old "Vladimir."
Advertisement
Free IQ Test

But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."

The Bush-Cheney campaign can console itself with the hope that the embarrassing first debate images will be superseded by debates No. 2 and No. 3. (Nixon aced the third of his four matchups with Kennedy.) But it can't suppress the pictures from an ongoing war that only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Allawi believe is getting better by the day. It was back in March that the discrepancy between the White House's narrative and the reality on the ground was first captured in dramatic split screen: as Dick Cheney delivered a speech at the Reagan presidential library bashing Mr. Kerry and boasting of our progress in Iraq, his sour certitude was paired with an especially lethal car bombing in central Baghdad. These days the bombings are more frequent and often more lethal, and such tragic juxtapositions are the rule rather than the exception.
<...>


The rest of the article is as dead-on as these quoted above -- make sure you read it!

[cthrumatrix]

1. this is "spot on"....a good read.

[kaitykaity]

2. Add that 51 minute Kerry bash that was supposed

to be a "major policy speech" to the list of tricks
that failed.

I guess when things are going well, media manipulation
works, but the real world will intrude if it starts to
go bad. Good rule to remember.