If it looks like a duck

I'm too old for this. The voting hasn’t started yet and already my blood pressure is off the wall. In the last week the race in Iowa has become too close to call, with four candidates within the margin of error of the polls. And, since the polls usually don't mean as much in Iowa because of the caucus system, all bets are off. I can’t take it, and I don’t even have a dog in this fight. Clark is sitting in frozen New Hampshire waiting for the battle to come to him. The outcome in Iowa will of course have an influence on the race in New Hampshire, but just how much remains to be seen. It depends not so much on what happens on the ground as what is perceived by the media to have happened and how they interpret it for the ignorant masses. Which brings me to the main topic of this post.

I have never really appreciated the tremendous power of the media to shape public opinion before. I guess in the past I never was as interested in the outcome of a race enough to perceive the media’s power to shape the public's perceptions. The media made Howard Dean the front runner before a single vote was cast; all we heard for weeks was the inevitability of the Dean juggernaut. Why? Because the media said so. No other candidate could get any air to breathe. The coverage was all Howard Dean. The media completely refused to acknowledge Clark'ss emergence as a contender until it was so obvious that they had to grudgingly mention it usually as a footnote after another inevitability story about Dean.

In addition to having an incredible herd instinct the media is lazy. The Drudge smear is a classic example. Drudge made a deliberate attempt to distort Clark's testimony to a congressional committee about the Iraq war, to change black into white and for a time virtually everybody in the media bought into it. They didn't check it themselves -- after all, that would have required reading the testimony, which might take half an hour. Better to just repeat what was already in print; you could always say, should the article prove to be bullshit, that you didn't do the research, that you just reported what was already in the public record. The fact that Clark was testifying as an opponent of the war and Richard Perle as a proponent didn't seem to bother anyone at all. After all the quotes that Drudge used spoke for themselves, Clark obviously was in favor of the war. A quick Google search revealed nine pages of links about this story, many of them merely a repetition of the Drudge report, including none other than Lou Dobbs of CNN. To be sure, thanks to the Internet and some of the excellent Bloggers on it as well as as one or two in the print media this story was eventually revealed for the garbage it was. Pure propaganda, total bullshit. But the damage had already been done. The seed of "He can't be trusted" had already been planted; all that was needed was several other pieces along the same lines and it would become conventional wisdom: Clark can’t be trusted. Does this sound familiar? "Gore the liar" was built the same way. And the media was either too lazy or maybe even too biased to question the material underlying this assertion or the assertion itself. What is the difference between a lazy free press and a totally controlled press in a totalitarian state? Absolutely nothing! The end result is the same. We get propaganda, not news.

So when the pundits start pontificating about the significance of the Iowa caucuses, remember one thing: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and the media calls it a duck, then it’s probably an elephant.

Mickey