narrative management

This is another one of those posts about the selling of ideas—PR-plus, if you will—so the squeamish may skip ahead to the next post…if there is a next post tonight.

Boyd Blundell at TPM Cafe has some astute insights into how to appeal to people’s emotions in order to bring them on board your political campaign.

when it comes to managing outrage, Katrina is the ripest of low hanging fruit. As I argued here, Katrina coverage naturally elicited massive outrage because it cut at the roots of the nation’s self image. So, while Americans have sophisticated mental defenses when it comes to avoiding outrage, Katrina has the notable advantage of having already penetrated them.

This is where the narrative management comes in. If this story, which has already left people outraged — at FEMA, for example — can be consistently tied in to the broader narrative that incompetent and negligent government causes real live suffering, then the ball will start to roll on its own. But if it just pops up in fits and spurts in articles like Grunwald’s, then a massive tool for shaping the political discourse in a way that advances progressive goals will have been lost. But the narrative has to be nurtured and prodded as deliberately as the administration exploited 9/11.

I don’t agree with his bottom line (I don’t think it’s a good idea to appeal to people’s fears and anxieties about the incompetence of their government. Indeed, I think it’s a very bad idea. It makes them feel insecure but doesn’t necessarily send them running to their polling places; it may cause even more of them just to turn off and apathy is already a huge problem…along with inertia).

I also don’t think the administration had to do much massaging of 9/11, and I don’t think they over-exploited it. (But I may not be objective about that—9/11 was a watershed for me. It happened in my backyard, for one thing.)

So that’s what I don’t agree with. What I do agree with is that managing the narrative is a critical element in any public endeavor in the 21st century. If you do not get your message out effectively, you may as well not have a message.

More about this another time too.