The Media is a lot of People

First you have the local radio and news paper guys. They actually hire a few reporters who keep the emergency services scanner on all the time and show up promptly to get pictures and video when something breaks. Experienced reporters who freelance make their work available to local stations, news papers, and the news wire services. A story that is picked up by a news service is meaningful, because it helps establish credibility as well as extra cash. Everyone wants to get published, so the wire service is probably not relying exclusively on just one reporter. Today they can also verify things directly from press releases of the responsible agency at the scene, before choosing the report to make available to their subscribers. TV reporters also respond and report on major incidents, but they are typically locked to a specific local station and network. TV reports are generally less appropriate for the wire service. So if you want real news check the traditional news services: Reuters, AP, BBC, and sometimes your local news paper if they write their own stories.With the exception of Faux, CNN, and MSNBC the nightly news programs have not changed all that much. They still mostly read the news they write, from a teleprompter with occasional stories from field reporters. For the most part CBS, NBC, and ABC are TV versions of the news wire services. In short they go with more fact based stories than not. Many stories are run a few days late anyway. In addition all of the traditional evening news programs are long on commercials and relatively short on content. This system excludes much of the content which exists in alternative channels, leading to attacks on the “mainstream” media, for not reporting everything.As I have written elsewhere, I believe liberal and conservative are outlooks. When a group of individuals come together to achieve some common collection of goals, they tend to be more inclusive in order to build support for their ideas. While accumulating the power to effect the desired change the developing group is more inclusive and thus liberal. Once success is achieved, however, the leadership becomes more exclusive and thus conservative to protect their ideas, place, position, and power. After success the primary goal changes from acquiring power to maintaining the party and the status of the leaders, thus a transition in outlook from liberal to conservative.For whatever reason success engages a desperate need to remain successful. The primary operators of these efforts are often not the leaders of the initial group. If someone on the fringe is heavily invested in the project, they are quite likely to be tempted to intervene if the original leaders fail to meet expectations, or otherwise increase the the chances the fringe operator’s activities will be discovered. Consider Stalin’s rise to power. In a more mature organization the fringe operators seem likely to be protected and tasked to do more dirty work of the leaders. They are always available for tasks the leaders cannot risk getting involved with. Fringe operators are almost always expendable. Consider the Watergate caper. In that case Mr. Nixon was a bit too much of a fringe operator himself to trust the project with a chain of intermediaries who could provide him with plausible deniability. On the other hand Reagan skated away scot-free largely because he did not make that mistake during the Iran-Contra affair. But I digress. Party politics has always involved an ongoing conflict of message. During the American Revolution the British message was drowned out by the number of printing presses producing pamphlets and argumentation supporting the revolt. Things are not much different today, except our technology makes it possible to deliver the message much more quickly, and on a far more massive scale. In this context when there is a conflict of message, fringe operators are the first messengers, and truth is the first casualty. In the business of politics the only thing that actually matters is winning. In that context, all political parties have a collection of operatives who do things candidates do not have time for, and public officials cannot otherwise legally get involved with. They are often involved in polling, message shaping, and opposition research. They are the people who figure out the issues which will get voters to the polls on election day. Some are involved in attempting to reformat the message of the opposition. In more recent times they attempt with some success to redefine the message of opposition candidates. Occasionally they serve as fixers when a candidate has private behavior issues. In summary the political operative spends most of his time as a fringe operator at the edge of real political power. These people are motivated beyond anything most of us can imagine. These are the people an elected official should never put in a position which requires sworn testimony, because to them winning is far more important than truth.

In the US we have two major parties, one of which is rather adapt at building and maintaining a collection of constituencies who can sometimes work together, while ignoring each other’s faults and disagreements when they feel the need to win. The Democratic party is currently trapped by the sheer number of their constituencies. Their party has transitioned from liberal rationalism toward a progressiveness that sometimes appears to approach the irrational by seeking change because change is supposedly possible. The opposition party has used this ongoing transition to motivate its operatives and drive its own voters to the polls at major election cycles. Currently the pool of additional progressive constituencies is mostly empty. Meanwhile, they seem to have permanently alienated a major segment of the majority ethnic group within our country. In addition their existing constituencies are too interlocked to openly accept any faction fleeing the purge to ideological purity within the opposition.

The other party has not been successful with serious constituency building since Nixon. Reagan won in 1980 primarily because he came to understand that declaring he was against abortion would guarantee his party thirty percent of the popular vote. Consequently the GOP has been a prisoner of that decision, because they cannot resolve that issue nor attract additional constituencies. A Log Cabin Republican co-worker once ask why his party should fix anything that secures thirty percent of the vote, when his party has no other common goals with that block of voters. More or less simultaneously conservative Democrats abandoned their party in favor of the GOP, establishing the trend toward the current conservative vs liberal alignment. In addition the GOP has been consumed by an ongoing purge to ideological purity for several election cycles. This has forced most liberals, many moderates, and even a few from the olde money Boston – Cincinnati families to abandon the party. Currently their primary constituencies are the established commercial business lobby, olde money, and Evangelical Christians who oppose the SCOTUS ruling on abortion. Recently the party is abandoned by longstanding and prominent members of their conservative ideological base.Often the political operatives have no occupation other than political consulting work. When their party is in power their reward may be a real job somewhere. Otherwise they spend their time attempting to make trouble for elected officials and prominent members of the party in power. Political operatives have to be well connected in order to engage in their work. Washington is an expensive place. Income and status are important. Maintaining the operative lifestyle requires lots of resources. Otherwise they have to find a real job, dig deeper into the trust fund, or find a few clients in a somewhat friendly foreign country. Most operatives probably feel at home with the constituencies of wealth and power. Consequently the conservative party has a number of extra-party groups, operatives, and fringe operators who spend significant time shaping it’s message, while harassing the opposition. This activity appears to have increased as the constituency building by the opposition party became increasingly progressive. Prior to the 2016 election a constellation of focus groups, think tanks, and lone wolf political consultants engaged in an unprecedented level of political messaging intended to destroy the viability of any and all opposition candidates.My dad had a shortwave radio which I found fascinating from the time I was a small child. It was a tube radio, circa 1938. Anytime Dad replaced a tube or realign the string and knob which turned the tuning capacitor, I was close by, hoping for a chance to get a better idea how the radio worked. Lots of extra stations lived on the short wave bands. There were weird ones with people repeating endless sets of numbers. There was a few time stations. I liked the one in Britain, complete with the proper accent. By the late 1960s I had learned enough about radio to repair Dad’s radio myself. At some point I came into possession of an old car radio which had much better gain than Dad’s Stewart-Warner. I do not recall for sure, but a neighbor or relative probably gave it to me. As a teenager I became an aggregation point for broken electronic stuff. Sometimes I still fix stuff for donations, with the understanding that if it cannot be repaired for a reasonable cost, I have the option to keep the remains for parts. I remember this radio was from a GM vehicle. In any case I disassembled it and built new tuning coils to pick up the short wave bands. This involved constructing a new mechanism with an electric drive motor, and a manual alternative for extremely fine tuning. In any case the new tuning mechanism was larger than the original radio. I could pick up stations in Australia, Europe, Southern Asia, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. Radio Moscow was of particular interest, as they spent a lot of hours everyday beaming English language programs to North America. I found their programs fascinating. As I recall they spent a lot of time lecturing about stuff. Sometimes it seemed that maybe they were in a different universe. Their description of America was certainly not where I lived. Occasionally they had a news and weather break, in which a lot of time was spent discussing the sunbathers in their bikinis taking a dip and sunning themselves on the banks of the river Volga. Shortly afterward they would give the current temperature as maybe -35 degrees. Even if the temperature they gave was in Celsius it would equate to 3 below zero Fahrenheit, which is far too cold to be out in a bikini with the wind blowing 20 miles per hour. This was not a description of winter swimming found on YouTube were someone leaves her winter clothes at the sauna, then ventures out to a hole in the ice for a dip, then mostly frozen, skimpers back inside the sauna. The Radio Moscow description of winter 1972 sounded a lot more like Miami Beach. We lived on a farm on the highest ridge between the higher mountains of southwest Virginia. I could see snow on Mt. Rogers, Whitetop, and Brumley Mountain much of the winter. I remember Dad digging a path to get out the back door through 4 feet of snow in 1958. I will never forget the feeling of 25 below Fahrenheit. As a teen I often had to dig through several inches of ice on our pond so the cows could drink. It was instantly obvious that accuracy was not one of the prerogatives of Radio Moscow circa 1972. That was my introduction to something called propaganda.Propaganda was a major activity of both sides during the cold war. The perpetrators use a number of methods in an ongoing attempt to create confusion and distrust of the established information sources in a target audience. The goal is to replace primary sources with alternatives, and at a minimum create doubt about the accuracy of the primary reporting agencies. The propaganda agency wins if confusion is created. It has been reported that during WW2 the US placed fleets of inflatable ships off the southern coast of Europe to convince nazi intelligence the D-Day attack was coming from the opposite direction. During the cold war the Soviet Union spend thousands of hours trying to convince the rest of the world that a socialist paradise existed near the arctic circle. At the same time the US used Radio Free Europe to counter the never ending reports from Radio Moscow. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Empire used propaganda to misdirect their populations. The Soviets however seem to have been the most successful propaganda makers of all time, as they seemed to have no concept of truth. There is also a rumor they have no zero, and anything “southern” is evil. There is a reason for that, but I digress. After the fall of the Empire many old Soviets seem to have made their way to America. Arriving here they needed something to do in order to feed themselves. Some times it seems obvious where they went to work.Political “mudslinging” has long been part of the American political scene. After the Internet arrived mudslinging morphed into the political meme. The meme is used in an attempt to change the message of a political opponent by replacing the public memory of the opposition statement with a fragment of propaganda. For instance in an fairly recent oped piece Elisabeth Warren made a statement citing a medical journal that it was as safe for a woman to have an abortion as having a tonsillectomy. This is in response to state efforts restricting OB/GYN admitting privileges to hospitals which do not allow abortions. A meme quickly appeared on Facebook indicating that Ms. Warren equated an abortion directly with a tonsillectomy. The meme maker is attempting to modify the candidate’s message so that voters remember the incident differently from what actually transpired. Memes are another form of propaganda from the political operatives tool box. They are an effective way to sling political mud when no one has the time to fact check every assertion in every meme. Mems are also used to attribute motives to individuals in the opposing party.Conspiracy theory is another form of propaganda in which political operatives sometimes indulge. One of many ways to build a conspiracy theory is to collect a timeline of events, then remove the dates and times, after which one or more persons play the what if game. Removing the event timelines makes it possible to logically build a case for connecting events which are not otherwise connected. An example of this is the uranium mine deal, construed to involve HRC even though it happened long before she was in the state department. Long running conspiracy theories include several involving the Kennedy assassination, the moon landings, and UFOs. The Whitewater affair seems to have gained credibility as a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory primarily serves to disrupt trust of government officials and institutions.Fake News is a propaganda tactic which often seems to start life disguised as satire. An operative establishes a site on which fantastic fabrications are posted as satire. After the satirical story has been published for a while, a second operative cherry picks quotes form the first satire article, presenting them as if they are fact, but without attribution. These articles sometimes include a good mix of speculation and sometimes what if conspiracies. Soon a third operative quotes the article of the second, and a fourth the third. At some point the operative who originally quoted the satirical piece removes his original article and re-writes it quoting one of the more recent articles. As the round robin articles continue speculation gets replaced by assertion. This tends to obscure the origin of the piece, such that only fact checkers who maintain a full archive of such web articles will be able to figure out how the fabrication evolved. Often the source of a fake news article can only be speculatively defined. When the fact checker is able to mine the data and expose the hoax, the operatives turn on the fact checker, claiming the non existence of the article of origin is proof the fact checker is some how biased against their party. Additionally the operatives and their candidates create additional information chaos by attacking the traditional news media for not reporting these fabricated stories.In summary the best way to avoid becoming mired in political propaganda is to avoid interaction with the people, institutions, and networks which distribute such. It is extremely hard to do news analysis without getting involved in one of the activities listed above, so stay away from programs which are short on events and long on analysis. Cable TV news analysis is probably mostly a hoax. Much of it is simply sensationalism designed to take up air time, while keeping an audience glued to the TV set. Recently I watched a couple hours on one of the more prolific news analysis channels. Multiple anchors asked a series of slightly different questions, to which the same characters in their panel of experts made the same replies. Obviously they had three experts who made one statement. Each anchor framed his or her show for the evening around those comments. Each of these new shows was at least half an hour long. So now along with fake news we have fake reporting, fake analysis, and fake news programs. As for who to blame: The weather guy. About 20 years ago the Atlanta weather people discovered they could mesmerize an audience for several hours simply by turning ever weather event into a TV event. I don’t know where they got the idea, but it has grown, evolved, and infect all of the TV news scene.