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Blogging and Sponsorship and Openness
Jane_the_Great writes "In an article in the Wall Street Journal it is "revealed" that during the 2004 primaries, the Howard Dean campaign hired bloggers hoping that positive things would be said of Dean in the blogs. The news is from the horse's mouth." It's hard to believe that the WSJ is equating prominently disclosed campaign consulting with secret payments from the U.S. Government treasury to TV personalities in order to promote Republican policies, but they are. (Obeying media rule #1, "Both sides are equally bad", even if they aren't.) Nevertheless, there's an interesting, deeper issue: how transparent should blogging (and all media) be? How could transparency possibly be enforced?
We have to learn a new vocabluary in this country, or we will never be able to talk about fairness and accuracy properly.
What appears to be evolving in the crucible of American politics is a startling robust form of doublethink. Conservatives have unquestionably mastered it; it's not clear if other political groups are for the moment less able or less willing.
Fox News is a propaganda organization; it is so biased as to basically redefine the concept of bias in the U.S. media. But how does it defend itself? By exclaiming that it is the most fair, and the most balanced. In fact, by going even further accusing everyone else of bias.
This kind of audacity is more associated with religious figureheads and communist states. But regardless of who is using it most effectively this week (and believe me, I am cynical about all American professional politicians, regardless of professed ideology), the problem is that the approach is sound, and based on good cognitive psych. It exploits a weakness in the way people think and reason. In layman's terms, it short-circuits the brain. Sadly, vehemence and a threatening posture do figure deeply into the calculus of our decision-making.
When you see through it, you realize it's an extraordinarily cynical trick. The problem is that many, many people are confused by it. In fact, much as Orwell observed, the lie is embraced especially well by people who know, on some level, it is a lie. These are many of the people who, for instance, engage in revert wars in Wikipedia over the Fox News entry.
It is the human's great strenght and weakness: we are fully capable of lively psychological engagement with paradoxes and contradictions.
In order to prevent societal free-fall, it will be necessary for each of us to learn to see through this kind of technique, call a spade a spade. To not be confused or intimidated by hypocrisy, in other words.
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I wish this wasn't AC, because this compares with Luther's 95 Theses although on a much smaller and completely insignificant scale. This post is dead on and deserves to be modded as insightful.