Ooh, look! There’s another shiny bauble.
Jamison Foser lists a few of the basic “Clinton Rules”:
…If any part of an alleged scandal turns out to be true, the media behaves as though the entire story is true…
…Media parse every statement by progressives in response to controversy, looking for something to ridicule — whether the ridicule is fair or not…
…Allegations that turn out to be unproven, or even false, are used by the media as evidence in support of future allegations…
I would add: Any spin by the republican “Mighty Wurlitzer”, no matter how outrageous, is guaranteed uncritical multiple repetitions in the media over time until it achieves complete saturation and the status of a permanent meme.
Originally a CIA term for a propaganda machine, it refers to the network of right-wing publications, think-tanks, and broadcast outlets that regurgitate the day’s RNC talking points. “Wurlitzer” was a company that manufactured organs; cf. “House Organ”. For further details, see Robert Borosage’s article in the May 6, 2002 American Prospect. Ex-conservative columnist David Brock in his confessional memoir Blinded by the Right coined the term Republican Noise Machine to describe the same phenomenon.
You know, we just want a competent media in this country that covers actual news. That might even save the republic. Important news like a collapsing economy and the attempts to save it, rising unemployment, two wars, the weakening of rule of law…
Let’s document the documentation of the atrocities:
The hunting of the president resumes
The right is trying to link Obama to Blagojevich and corruption — and the mainstream media is playing along. The Clinton rules are back.
By Joe Conason
Dec. 12, 2008 | Questions are raised. Connections are drawn. Conspiracies are theorized. Guilt is imputed, implied, asserted and very widely associated. And more of the same feckless fingerpointing is exactly what Barack Obama should expect from the Republicans, the right-wing propaganda machine and their enablers in the mainstream media…
Media Matters: Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago
by Jamison Foser
To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar…
by digby
…Nice. He [Eugene Robinson] goes on to spell out all the ways in which it’s ridiculous to assume that Obama is involved in this scheme, but, as expected, it still doesn’t pass the smell test…
The Art of Insinuation Without Evidence 101
…[Michael] Scherer concludes by saying, “Obama may be bringing change to Washington, but the game still remains the same.” Yes, Scherer will see to that…
There’s so much more (from the Daily Howler): PARSE TILL YOU DROP! Vacuous pundits are still parsing hard. This week, skilled progressives pushed back.
The difference now from those halcyon years between 1992 and 2000? There are more people in more places pushing back against the right wingnut dreck flowing into the media. I just hope it’s enough.
Meanwhile, our useless media ignores real news [pdf].