MSM pilot fish strike back

The October 27 Ad Age is particularly interesting in light of the Fraters Libertas post discussed below. For a trade paper, Ad Age has become stridently partisan during this election cycle. Earlier I noted how they pooh-poohed the Rather/forged documents fraud and engaged in a little fact-challenged Bush-bashing to boot.

This week they are at it again but with in a triple dose.

Their ad reviewer is apparently an acolyte of the Moore school of politics. Here is how he starts his critique of the Ashley advertisement:

This has been the most divisive, polarized and dishonest presidential campaign in recent memory. It has stunk of lies and sleaze and Swiftboat veterans who have long memories but no clue about what democracy is, much less patriotism.

My jaw dropped when I read that. I can understand questioning the conclusions of the Swift Boat veterans. I think an honest voter can disagree with them and believe that Kerry would make a better president than Bush. But to question the patriotism of highly decorated veterans-some of them wounded in action or tortured as POWs-is an egregious libel.

Later on he decides to make sure we all understand the reality that the Ashley spot obscures:

That may also be what voters want to see in the heart and soul of their president: a powerful but compassionate father figure, who can hug us all and tell us, don't worry, everything is going to be OK.

But everything's in shambles

Of course, everything isn't OK. Everything, from the economy to the bloody Iraq fiasco to our basic Americans freedoms, is in a shambles. But one thing the polls show is clear: In moments of crisis, the people have a deep-seated psychological need to trust Our Leader, no matter how manifestly untrustworthy he may be. This commercial has seized on that need like no other message in this long, ugly campaign.

The main front page story starts with a big scary headline:

Christian group spooks advertisers

It discusses the efforts of the American Family Association to get advertisers to stop funding offensive programs. The story is filled with rhetoric designed to worry Ad Age's readers about those pushy, ignorant Christians.

enlisting marketers in its cause by tapping the fear of its virtual army of believers

FRIGHTENING FORCE

SOME RESISTANCE-- Not all marketers wilt under AFA pressure

While the AFA has sent some advertisers scurrying for cover

In their editorial, though, they call for courage:

Marketers must set own agendas

PRESSURE GROUPS ARE FREE to hammer marketers about where they advertise and how they act. It's incumbent on marketers to listen, but they must not let special interests set the agenda.

The big joke is that the advertising business is a special interest in its own right. They like edgy commercials and edgy programming. They like spending their client's money on commercials that their colleagues will see. They don't want to complicate things by having to listen to customers. They get offended when clients wonder if their money is really building the brand and increasing sales.

Ad Age doesn't really dig into the question of why AFA is now having success nor do they ask if there are forces at work that marketers should pay attention to.

The AFA, OTOH, has a good understanding of why they are effective:

While the AFA has been at this for a quarter century, its recent successes stem largely from the power of e-mail to reach supporters and advertisers, said Tim Wildmon, president of the group. "E-mail is instantaneous, and our numbers are growing rapidly," he said. "A lot of people are disgusted with the explicitness on television, and the advertisers I believe are having a hard time defending it. Couple that with the fact that it's a very competitive marketplace. You don't want to offend several hundred thousand people."

Consumers do not get their news just from Dan Rather; they do not form an opinion about Coke just from viewing commercials on their favorite programs. Now they know what other programs Coke supports. That, too, becomes part of the brand message. Formerly, a brand could send separate messages to different segments-be edgy with MTV, be apple pie on broadcast news shows. News, in turn, was perceived as nonpartisan, fair, and patriotic. All these elements have changed.

Marketers face a novel challenge with the rise of new media and the destruction of barriers that formally blocked the flow of information. They no longer can approach brand-building as a matter of one-way messages. They cannot be certain that their market segmentation won't have blow-back.

For marketers, this is a problem. Ford wants truck buyers to have one message "Ford Tough" in mind. They do not want to see "Ford funds Rather's partisan lies" take hold. An attention-grabbing ad on MTV may win an award and move some sales in that demographic. But what happens if millions of conservative customers find out about it and are offended? How does a marketer measure the net ROI on that?

But it is clear that the legacy media, the advertising industry, and the trade papers are determined to hide this danger. Or maybe they are oblivious. They are pretty insular in their deep-blue coastal enclaves.

In any case, for The Elder to see results from his suggestion, heartland consumers have to find a way to make their voices heard where it matters: in the offices of the big companies whose ad budgets keep the MSM fat and happy.

Poll games: one last card to play

Captain Ed looks at the latest polls. I think his assessment is dead-on:

The GOP has to be happy with these results, but it still will take all of their effort in the remaining 70 hours or so to make sure they get voters out to the polls.

They will have to do so against a MSM headwind right up until the polls close in their states. The GOTV efforts in the Midwest battleground states will hold the key in a close election.

Previously, I discussed how campaigns try to use early vote totals in the East to influence late voting in the Midwest and west. In 2000, the networks joined in to help Gore. Bill Sammons's analysis is damning:

The vice president's margin of victory in Michigan was a slim 4 points, the same spread by which Bush had won Ohio thirty minutes earlier. Yet the networks were still mum about the Bush win. The tiers of Democratic bias were now working unmistakably in Gore's favor.

"The fact that we projected Florida and Michigan before we projected Ohio for Bush is very telling;" Tim Russert told NEC viewers, hinting that Bush was lagging in states that should have been his and losing close states far too easily.

Michigan and Ohio were both important battleground states that held large numbers of electoral votes. Both were won by four percentage points. Although all polls closed in Ohio at 7:30 P.M., the networks waited an hour and forty-five minutes to declare Bush the winner. Yet they raced to call Michigan for Gore the instant the first polls there closed-even though voters west of the time line had another hour in which to cast their ballots

The lopsided calls in Gore's favor continued all night. The clarity of the double standard is downright jarring when one examines the calls made by CNN, which was typical of the networks:

Gore won Illinois by 12 points and CNN crowned him the winner in one minute. Bush won Georgia by 12 points and CNN waited thirty-three minutes.

Gore won New Jersey by 15 points and CNN announced it in one minute. Bush won Alabama by 15 points anci CNN waited twenty-six minutes.

Gore won Delaware by 13 points and CNN waited just three minutes. Bush won North Carolina by 13 points and CNN waited thirty-four minutes.

Gore won Minnesota by 2 points and CNN waited thirty-seven minutes. Bush won Tennessee by 3 points and CNN waited twice as long-an hour and sixteen minutes.

Withholding Tennessee from Bush was especially mendacious because news of the vice president's failure to carry his home state would have sent a powerful political message to the rest of the nation. If Gore couldn't carry Tennessee, how could he be expected to win the presidency? Even Walter Mondale managed to carry his home state of Minnesota in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won the other forty-nine states in a landslide.

Similarly, the networks were reluctant to call President Clinton's home state of Arkansas for Bush, which would have sent another potent message. Arkansas was one of the few states in which Gore had given Clinton permission to campaign for him. Timely news of Gore's failure to carry the state would have shocked Democrats and heartened Republicans nationwide. Instead, CNN waited three hours and thirty-three minutes before awarding Arkansas to Bush, who had won the state by six points. This inexplicable delay was even longer than the two hours and forty-one minutes CNN waited before giving Bush West Virginia, which he had also won by six points. By contrast, CNN waited only thirty-six minutes to give Maine to Gore, who had carried the state by only five points.

The pervasiveness of the double standard was shocking. Whenever Gore won a state by double-digit margin, the networks projected him the winner in three minutes or less. But in state after state, Bush posted double-digit victories that the networks refused to acknowledge for at least thirty minutes.

When Bush won Missouri by 4 points, CBS waited two hours and six minutes to hand it over. When Gore won Pennsylvania by the same margin, CBS shortened the lag time to forty-eight minutes. This was an enormously important call because it told America at 8:48 P.M. Eastern Time that Gore had already pulled off the trifecta, which was tantamount to winning the White House.

I see no reason to think that 2004 will be different. Besides the speed with which they call states for Bush or Kerry, the Senate races will be a test of their objectivity. If Republicans gain seats, that makes Tom Daschle a weaker candidate in South Dakota. It also could affect turnout in the West, which will matter in states like Oregon, New Mexico, and Hawaii.

Everyone becomes their parents

Jack Sparks has a few words about Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live. (Talk about a fat pitch thrown down the middle of the plate.)

The sad truth of the mainstream music business is that the talentless are rewarded for their good looks (natural and otherwise) and their willingness to whore themselves out to a particular style or schtick. The use of guide vocals, Pro Tools in the studio, and flat-out lip synching is the dirty little secret they don't want anyone to know

I wonder if Lorne Michaels still thinks his show is edgy and unpredictable? In terms of musical guests it has become about as edgy as American Bandstand circa 1974. And the "performances" are every bit as authentic.

If Michaels really wanted to rock his audience back on its heels, he'd listen to Jack and book the Drive-by Truckers.

"Kerry's Afghan Amnesia"

Charles Krauthammer:

This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it. Whom do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being called a "quagmire" during its second week and has seen it through to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius, who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened -- who would have done "everything" differently in Iraq, yet in Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous, radical and risky decision -- except one. Which, of course, he would have done differently. He says. Now.

As Beldar says:

John Kerry, neatly summed up in three words, nine letters, two punctuation marks: "He says. Now."

"Starve The Beast"

The Elder over at Fraters Libertas is totally out of patience with the legacy media and has some suggestions for a healthier lifestyle.

I would add one suggestions and one caveat. The suggestion is that blog readers help increase the readership of their favorite blogs by emailing posts/links to their friends and acquaintances. Only about 10% of the public read blogs. Increasing that figure undercuts the power of the legacy media.

The caveat is that the MSM and their advertising partners are in such deep denial that they will exlain away the lost viewers as trivial in number and unimportant in buying power. I've blogged on this point before. See:

MSM: Shrinking Audience, Leftward Drift

Agincourt and Bloggerdom

Denial can be a winning strategy

Hersh

Bad Press

This side of Dan Rather, no one has more cause for concern about fallout from CBS's scandalous document hoax than Seymour Hersh. For no journalist has benefited more from the decades-old jerry-rigged system of American news reporting now being razed before our eyes.

Seymour Hersh Vs. Richard Perle

Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Directly reversing what really happened. (One might think Hersh had factual dyslexia if the reversals were not so consistently in the service of his far left ideology.) Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. For anyone familiar with Hersh's earlier work, his article on the Bush administration's being taken in by false documents is especially outlandish because Hersh has repeatedly been taken in by con men peddling sensational phony stories.

Hersh, Hitchens, etc.

Jeff Goldstein has run out of patience with a certain so-called conservative blogger

Nothing more to say except indeed and rtwt.

Lite blogging ahead

Back on Thursday

"Postmodern War"

Victor Hanson Davis wrote this before the invasion of Iraq. It seems eerily prescient.

In hour one of the conflict, we are supposed to expect to see the deployment of weapons of mass destruction — which many in the world community still profess are not there. If the Iraqis use these agents of death, we are culpable for prompting such dangers; if they don't, then there was no real casus belli in the first place and the war will be deemed, post facto, as unnecessary. Americans must be swift, decisive, and victorious in their warmaking — but not to the extent that they should kill too many of the enemy. Our GPS bombs must not just be smart, but rather brilliant — and thus distinguish and target (wounding rather than killing) only 80,000 individual Baathists and Saddamites within a population of 26 million.

We should not lose American soldiers abroad; but, to be fair, we should at least suffer a few dead (preferably white, male, older, and officers) to avoid criticism about the "body bag" syndrome, in which, as in Kosovo and Afghanistan, Americans kill without being killed — and thus appear too much the overdog for the postcolonial guilt of Europeans or the tastes of the "Harper's Index." We expect that Saddam might well blow up oil wells, gas innocents, foul the seas, hit Israel, and worse; but the responsibility will be ours, not his, inasmuch as we expect mass killing from him but demand its instant prevention from us.

There is a Potemkin phoniness to this war to come. We live in a world of images broadcast immediately into our living rooms without commentary — or, indeed, any intellectual context at all. Thus, because a Tariq Aziz — a really murderous, awful man — can get on a plane to the Vatican without his holster, he looks to the ignorant as if he were a jet-setting, press-conference-convening statesman like Tony Blair. Dan Rather sits across from a mass murderer in a Western tie and suit and questions the tyrant as if he is interviewing the head of the local school board.

Text, image, and rhetoric — not the deeds themselves — become reality. Had Mr. Bush, Clinton-like, only bit his lip, apologized to various peoples, talked of "multilateralism," and spun his southern drawl to sound more like the Joads than Sam Houston, then he too might have bombed a thug (in Europe, no less) for two months without congressional, U.N., or Cameroon's approval. Even ANSWER and "Not in Our Name" would have felt his pain and thus stayed home.

Nazi Guerillas

Caught part of a show on the History Channel called "Nazi Guerillas" on Friday night. I was half asleep and fighting a cold so I did not take detailed notes. But a couple of points were directly applicable to the current situation in Iraq.

First, just because a bunch of psychopaths are willing to kill soldiers and civilians, that doesn't mean their cause has popular support. In the case of Germany, the werewolves were active in areas where the populace was eager to see an end to the war even if that meant American occupation.

Second, the U.S. Army put out the word that guerillas caught fighting out of uniform would be subject to summary execution. That threat was sometimes carried out.

Third, the U. S. Army censored all mention of guerilla attacks from press reports because they believed it encouraged the Nazi bitter-enders and provided useful intelligence to the guerilla cells.

War is messy business. It is never as clean as we might hope. Not even WWII ended as cleanly as the MSM thinks it should. This is from Murray and Millett's A War to be Won:

In the wake of liberation, French and Italian partisans-- both rich in dedicated Communists-- murdered as many as 8,000 suspected collaborators, often with Allied troops nearby

.

"The Daily Dodge"

James Bowman looks at John Stewart on Opinion Journal:

Mr. Stewart sounds in his book as he does on his TV show--not affectionate but arrogant, as if he were way too cool to bother finding out the facts of the real history, or news, that he's sending up. Who can take such stuff seriously?

See this from February:

Humor is over-rated

Much of the joking around is a weasel's game anyway. It lets the smug but superficial camouflage their ignorance while retaining center stage. They don't have to defend what they say-- they were just joking. But they still are smarter than you.

"John Kerry's real record as an antiwar activist"

Never Apologize, Never Explain

JOHN KERRY SAYS HE IS "PROUD" of his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War. Why, then, have he and his spokesmen consistently misrepresented them? Indeed the Kerry camp has been so effective in obscuring this history that both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to run corrections on the subject recently because their reporters relied on misinformation that the Kerry camp had succeeded in putting into wide circulation.

Now why did he go and let the secret out?

Why Men Don’t Ask For Directions

Surprisingly confident

Right Wing News polled 85 right-of-center bloggers about the election. They are overwhelmingly positive about the election.

Ace smacks down Kerry's favorite conservative blogger

Willpower

It now appears that many of the people who argued along with me for war were not so serious at all.
Since Mr. Sullivan is so big on demanding apologies, I will demand one in return: I demand your apology for exhorting this nation into a war about which you were never morally serious nor intellectually thorough.

Bad week for Andrew. First he gets compared to wax fruit and then this:

Sullivan is not a warhawk. He's a bird of paradise. And that's far worse

Wait 'til the people of Ohio hear about this

So first, The Guardian UK starts a letter-writing campaign to get Ohio voters to vote Kerry. It doesn't work out so well (no surprise to anyone who understands Jacksonian America). So now they are in favor of direct action.

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

The Guardian is considered a respectable paper. Just off hand, name a respectable conservative paper that ever said "Timothy McVeigh, where are you now that we need you?"

HT: A Small Victory. She goes into the fever swamps so the rest of us don't have to. She has a far stronger stomach than i do.

UPDATE: Come to think of it, maybe this is one of the reasons they like Kerry.

Roger L. Simon reviews Stolen Honor

The movie consists of interviews with now gray or graying men who were incarcerated and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. Their stories are juxtaposed with the testimony of John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings. Despite the quality of the filmmaking, and my poor viewing conditions, I was deeply disturbed while watching this. It is not a "filmic" experience in the traditional sense. While viewing this movie, I imagine most of my generation find themselves reviewing themselves and their actions at the time rather than the film. I am far from resolving my view of Vietnam, although I still tend to think it was the wrong war. But the behavior of some factions of the antiwar side, factions which I fully supported then, were clearly out of line and as reprehensible as the war they wished to protest

RTWT here.

That O'Donnell Meltdown on MSNBC

Michelle Malkin and Country Store have the run-down and a round-up of links.

Between Matthews and O'Donnell, they are going to have to rename the network DSMBC.

UPDATE: O'Donnell doesn't want you to hear what John O'Neill has to say. Fortunately, he can't intimidate the guys of the Northern Alliance Radio Network. John O'Neill will be on their program TODAY (starts at 12.00pm CT). See Captain Ed for more details. I've listened in before via their webstream. It works pretty well even on a crappy dial-up connection.

It is probably worth noting that O'Donnell is "an Emmy-winning producer and writer of NBC?s 'The West Wing.'" You know, the show where it is the conservatives who rant and froth and the liberals who behave with courtesy and rely on sweet reason.

What we've lost

Outside the Beltway has a great round-up post on the pre-election maneuvering to declare any Bush victory illegitimate:

Both parties have a right--maybe even a duty--to take steps necessary to ensure that the votes of their supporters who are entitled to vote count. Monitoring ballots to ensure that they aren't confusing, printing voter guides to inform their supporters, stationing poll watchers to ensure fairness, and similar measures are healthy for our Republic and quite welcome. The scorched earth tactics adopted by Democrats in the aftermath of the 2000 race, however, threaten to undermine our system.

Post-Florida 2000, we have forgotten how we used to handle close elections. Here is Theodore White describing election night 1960 inThe Making of the President

There is nothing that can be done in these hours, for no one can any longer direct the great strike for America's power; the polls have closed. Good or bad, whatever the decision, America will accept the decision and cut down any man who goes against it, even though for millions the decision runs contrary to their own votes. The general vote is an expression of national will, the only substitute for violence and blood. Its verdict is to be defended as one defends civilization itself.

Good or bad, whatever the decision, America will accept the decision and cut down any man who goes against it.

Forty-four years ago that was probably true. But today we see that Gore is actually going to Florida to try to pull Kerry across the finish line.

Our memories are too short and we citizens have a naive confidence about the preservation of a healthy body politic. White covered China before Pearl Harbor and World War Two all over the globe. He traveled in Europe both before the war and during the reconstruction. He was not naive like us, nor did he share our cheap cynicism:

There is nothing like this American expression of will in England or France, India or Russia or China. Only one other major nation in modern history has ever tried to elect its leader directly by mass, free, popular vote. This was the Weimar Republic of Germany, which modeled its unitary vote for national leader on American practice. Out of its experiment with the system it got Hitler. Americans have had Lincoln, Wilson, two Roosevelts. Nothing can be done when the voting returns are flooding in; the White House and its power will move to one or another of the two candidates, and all will know about it in the morning. But for these hours history stops.

John Kerry: He even hunts like a European

Thursday morning, he happily emerged from the duck blind toting a Mossberg 835 Ulti Mag-pump action 12-gauge shotgun, but someone else was carrying his dead prey. "I'm too lazy," Kerry joked, adding that he was still "giddy" over the pennant victory Wednesday night of his beloved Boston Red Sox, catapulting the team into the World Series.

Read more here.

In Europe, hunting has been the preserve of the rich and the aristocracy. The peasants get to beat the bushes and carry the carcasses.

In America, everyone can hunt. But we carry our own birds.