Sunday, August 26, 2012

The Media Readies Itself For The 2012 Republican Convention!

Mickey Kaus:

The mainstream media comes in to Tampa with one mission, Brian, and that’s to subtly give the impression that Romney is floundering: The steering committee has secretly met. The new party line: After a typical August BS tumultuous month in which he was thrown off message by one distraction after another, especially the ones we in the MSM blew wildly out of proportion, Mitt Romney is a man Desperately Seeking Reboot!

He quotes NPR, which uses the words "tumultuous", "defensive", and "further off message" within two paragraphs.  Yahoo! is on board, of course:


Lots of defensive headlines there, and they use the Democratic "reset" attack line without the scare quotes it deserves (and would have had, if the Romney campaign had used the phrase in reference to the president).  The actually "reset" story is even more egregious:

....the Obama campaign says attempts by presumptive nominee Mitt Romney to refresh his image on the national stage are "not gonna work."

A spoof movie trailer produced by the campaign - dubbed an "epic cinematic preview " of Romney's week ahead - openly mocks Romney for what is portrayed as his repeated failure to cultivate a positive image.
"Nothing is working," says the announcer over a dramatic soundtrack. "His only hope is a convention reinvention. And an Etch-a-sketch of epic proportions will be shaken to its core."

Romney enters his convention week in Tampa, Fla., with the lowest personal popularity ratings for a presumptive presidential nominee since 1984. Forty percent of Americans have a favorable view of Romney, 49 percent unfavorable, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Republicans have enlisted an army of image-makers, advertising managers, designers and media producers to help craft a convention program...


That comes up, by the way, as "political news" within Yahoo! (scare quotes intentional).  The negative barrage continues:




Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times' Ombudsman, in his final column, speaks some obvious truths:

I...also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

...Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.


Innocent enthusiasm for a cause?  Or is the media involved in something deeper, something much more cynical and corrosive?  From a barely-related post over at The Belmont Club:

...in religions or ideologies at permanent war with unbelievers, lies are of no consequence if they advance the goal...Maybe that way you can get to the White House via the basement. By all means necessary; any which way you can.


Seems like the three media outlets referenced above are on board with that cause...

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