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Thunder On The Right, a review of the Republican Noise Machine...very pertinent today.
David Brock's 2004 book was not an easy read, in fact it could be a boring read. But he really named names and tactics because he was part of forming that very loud noise machine.
Thunder on the Right
Brock, who founded a watchdog organization aimed at exposing right-wing bias (Media Matters), gets under the hood of the Noise Machine. He shows how its parts mesh together, and explains where its financial fuel--mountains of cash--comes from.
Here's how it works. Right-wing tycoons give to tax-exempt foundations, which support a network of scholars, pundits, and talking heads. Their opinions, in turn, are propagated by talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh; publications like the Washington Times and New York Post; and, of course, the Fox News Channel.
Organization counts, too, and here the Noise Machine excels. It stays relentlessly on message, which it hones down to a handful of talking points, repeated over and over. That strategy can push even discredited stories, like most of the Swift Boat accusations, into the mainstream media.
At the same time the Right built its own media apparatus, it also nudged mainstream outlets to the right. Their relentless, 35-year-long, "work the refs" strategy has paid off handsomely. Conservatives have become a fixture on op-ed pages and political panel shows, and editors bend over backwards to make sure their stories are "balanced."
....As the Swift Boat ads illustrate, many on the Right believe the Marquess of Queensbury rules don't apply to them. According to Brock, some aren't satisfied with moving the political center of gravity rightward; they want to silence the opposition altogether.
The Right's scorched-earth approach also includes flouting journalistic standards. An argument often made by right-wing talking heads is that they don't have to be objective; their biases, after all, are out in the open for all to see. And when they're busted for factual errors, their standard response is "I'm a commentator, not a journalist."
The book also made it very clear that all Democrats would be "brutally slammed and systematically slandered"
With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media’s wildings of 1993 — which led to Clinton’s impeachment four years later — will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.
....My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific. In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather, in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004
Next Al Gore:
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. “Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar,” William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. “...Gore lies because he can’t help himself,” neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. “liar, liar,” screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore’s “serial mendacity” and warned that he is a “dangerous man.” “Gore may be quietly going nuts,” National Review’s Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: “The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore’s increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines ‘delusion’ thusly: ‘The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present...a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.’”
Then Howard Dean:
As I write in early 2004, the Republican Noise Machine is primed to run the same campaign of personal vilification in the 2004 presidential election, no matter which Democrat wins the nomination. An op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer has pronounced former Vermont governor Howard Dean “the Delusional Dean.” Krauthammer’s “diagnosis” rested on a transcript of a Dean appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. Through the use of ellipses, Krauthammer doctored the transcript to make his point.
I wish the think tanks that are supposedly on our side would have spent some of the money they got from corporations to build our own machine....instead of using them to make sure the "left" the "liberals" had little or no voice in party decisions.
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He has been very outspoken.
Readers who aren't political junkies will quickly tire of Brock's roll call of names and organizations. On the other hand, this book ought to be required reading for mainstream journalists and, especially, Democratic Party operatives, who still haven't figured out how the Right plays the media game.
We're 30 years behind the 8-ball & now the media is totally compromised. MSNBC is considered liberal news & FOX lies with impunity. I'm alarmed at the state of affairs in this country & I don't see the trajectory changing no matter who is at the helm, only the speed at which we go. We're headed for a train wreck.
Going to check my library for both of Brock's books to really depress myself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brock
In July 1997, Brock published a confessional piece in Esquire magazine titled "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man," in which he recanted much of what he said in his two best-known American Spectator articles and criticized his own reporting methods.[7][8] Discouraged at the reaction his Hillary Clinton biography received, he said, "I . . . want out. David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead." Four months later, The American Spectator declined to renew his employment contract, under which he was being paid over $300,000 per year.
Writing again for Esquire in April 1998, Brock apologized to Clinton for his contributions to Troopergate, calling it simply part of an anti-Clinton crusade.[2] He told a more detailed story of his time inside the right wing in his 2002 memoir, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, in which he settled old scores and provided inside details about the Arkansas Project's efforts to bring down Clinton. Later, he also apologized to Anita Hill.
...Brock directly addressed the right-wing "machine" in his 2004 book, The Republican Noise Machine, in which he detailed an alleged interconnected, concerted effort to raise the profile of conservative opinions in the press through false accusations of liberal media bias, dishonest and highly partisan columnists, partisan news organizations and academic studies, and other methods. Also in 2004, he featured briefly in the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, where he stated that the Arkansas Project engaged in political terrorism.
About the same time he founded Media Matters for America, an Internet-based progressive media group "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."
Brock announced in 2010 that he was forming a super-PAC, American Bridge, to help elect liberal Democrats, starting with the 2012 election cycle.[10] In describing Brock's intentions for the super-PAC, The New York Times referred to Brock as a "prominent Democratic political operative"[1] (mirrored by The Washington Post's characterization of him as a "former journalist-turned-political operative"
