Steve Benen performs an admirable smackdown of Republican media manipulator Frank Luntz:
[T]he notion that the [9/11 anniversary] offers us an opportunity to “appreciate” the previous administration “for keeping us safe” strikes me as woefully misguided.Luntz is the guy who performs polling on the language Republicans must use to push the party line. He is the guy who renamed the estate tax the death tax. His ultimate goal is to create a political vocabulary that prevents people from having heretical thoughts.
Indeed, such a claim should come with a series of pretty important caveats. Except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush’s inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, and waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush’s international unpopularity, the former president’s record on counter-terrorism was awesome.
Luntz has been successful because the establishment media is always willing to go along with his schemes. At first the loaded terms pushed by the GOP are introduced as 'what Republicans call', then that becomes 'what many call' and finally the term is used without any prefix and the New York Time, Washington Post et. al. loose some more readers. I have been calling them the establishment media for years since the term 'mainstream' hardly seems appropriate when Jon Stewart outranks them all amoungst the under 45s. Pretty soon the term 'legacy media' is going to be appropriate.
We have seen the Luntz approach before, it was set out by George Orwell in 1984 and Orwell in turn was making a commentary on Stalin. Luntzism is an evolutionary dead end, it is a one-way communication. The Republican party has stopped listening to America.
A few weeks ago I posed the question of how Progressives could get their message through when the establishment media allows the GOP to control the agenda.
This is not an easy task but think for a moment about the fact that the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have succeeded in doing so in the face of government censorship. People in Iran, Bahrain and even in Saudi Arabia have got the message out even if they have not been successful in ridding themselves of their dictatorships.
Here is the simple fact that allowed them to bypass the media: your friends and your family and your co-workers are all much more likely to listen to your arguments than the propaganda broadcast by the establishment media. If you argue a case that matters to them and support it with relevant facts they are far more likely to be convinced by you than by a talking head on the TV.
Over the course of twenty years Luntz has succeeded in getting the GOP and a large part of America to stop thinking. That is why his approach is a dead end, all we need to do to defeat him is to make people think.
