You can’t make this stuff up. Really:

Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit

Few scandals in recent years have provoked as much anger and dismay across Europe as the saga of Max Mosley, the overseer of grand prix motor racing who made tabloid news last weekend in a front-page exposé and accompanying Web video showing him in a sadomasochistic orgy with five supposed prostitutes in a London sex “dungeon.”

But beyond the licentiousness of the episode, it was the suggestion of Nazi undertones in the role-playing during the session in a basement in London’s fashionable Chelsea district that led to demands for Mr. Mosley’s resignation as president of the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say, and they would be right [e.a.]: 

Family history has added to the notoriety: Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.

 Naturally, automakers are distancing themselves from this nasty episode and this nasty man. But he isn’t having any of it [e.a.]:

Mr. Mosley, undaunted, tried to turn the tables on BMW and Daimler Benz, which manufactures Mercedes-Benz cars, with a statement that raised the specter of the two companies’ own role during the Nazi era. … His statement held to his insistence that fault lay with the way in which his actions had been reported by The News of The World, and not with the actions themselves.

And the NYT’s John F. Burns ends with the kicker:

If he recognized the irony in the son of the man who led Britain’s “blackshirts” in reproving German companies for their wartime past, Mr. Mosley did not show it.

Perhaps those commentators were right after all when they said that 9/11 signaled the end of irony.

Or perhaps 9/11 will prove to be the beginning of an era when people will once again understand irony, and satire, the weapon of resistance par excellence. One can always hope.

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Boorstin’s classic 1961 work of social criticism The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (which is extraordinarily fresh and insightful for a 45-year-old book, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day).

Underlying Boorstin’s thesis of a mid-twentieth-century American populace transfixed by images is his notion that advertising—or any kind of marketing—succeeds by holding up a mirror to potential customers and offering them an enticing, image of themselves (more on this another day, but let’s just say for now that advertising is about fantasy-fulfillment).

Now, along comes the NYT’s Elisabetta Povoledo to tell us that Italians are transfixed by a six-part TV biopic, “The Boss of Bosses,” because the mirror it holds up to its audience shows a somewhat less than flattering image of itself [e.a.]:

“Italy has always been fascinated by the Mafia, by its personification of evil,” [a reporter] said in a phone interview.

Another possible explanation for the popularity of “Il Capo dei Capi” may be that it goes beyond mere storytelling and puts Italy in front of an unflattering — if engrossing — mirror of itself. It suggests that if Mr. Riina became the most formidable and feared mobster in Italian history, it was thanks to the collusion of political and economic forces at various levels of Italian society.

“It’s not fiction — it’s a real story that tells 50 years of Italian history, and it names names,” said Pietro Valsecchi, who produced the series. “It tells us just what sort of country we have been living in, it shows us the complicity of the state, it puts the Mafia in our face.”

There’s some evidence for the notion that its roots in reality drive the popularity of the series:

“The Sopranos,” the HBO drama about Italian-American bad guys, never caught on here.

The producer gets the last word [e.a.]:

Fictionalizing reality may be the best way to educate Italy’s distracted audience, Mr. Valsecchi said. “Italians don’t read newspapers — they barely glance at headlines. But here they’re getting the full story, with all its implications.”

Well, he gets the next-to-last word. I get the last word, which is a minor amendment to Mr. Valsecchi’s proposition: Fictionalizing reality is a way to infotain an audience—that is, to capture its attention. But let’s not get carried away. That is different from educating the audience.

The mysterious disappearance of Madeleine McCann has become an unparalleled worldwide super-spectacular media sensation, and a lurid tabloid nightmare for her parents. The Sydney Morning Herald dubs it a “trial by new media” and a “vicious affair.”

Describing a chain of events that started with the British tabloid media “invading” the Portuguese town where the girl disappeared, the Herald suggests that the Portuguese authorities then leaked false stories about the parents in relatiation for the British tabs’ excesses.

British tabloids mocked many of these stories yet, hedging their bets, also reported them. The most lurid example was the Daily Express, which ran a headline, “Gerry may not be the father”, above a story that began: “The smear campaign in Portugal against the McCanns continued yesterday…”

The resulting spiral - unsourced British reports of unsourced Portuguese reports - created a perfect storm: huge media fascination with almost no facts to feed it.

Hmmm. This seems to focus the blame on the media. As I recall, however, the parents launched an enormous PR campaign across Europe and Britain to focus attention on their daughter almost immediately after she went missing. I wrote about it here in May, and also posted this astonishing picture, taken at a soccer stadium:

In May, writing about other abductees who were also (vaguely) in the news and who got almost no attention by comparison (such as the British journalist Alan Johnston and the Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari), I tried to explain the appeal of this particular story and the hold that stories can have over us:

… I’m not going to lecture you about how trivial this one abducted child is compared to the other abducted people in the news that we could be concerned about … Nope, this is not a guilt trip about the geopolitical messages we should be listening to (although we should be listening to them, of course). …

This is just a reminder of the extraordinary, magical, mystical power of [certain] stories to capture our imagination in a way that nothing else can—that is, to capture our imagination and attention in a way that influences us. …

Most of us will never run for office in ultra-violent Colombia. Most of us will never serve in Iraq. Most of us will never report from war-torn Gaza. Most of us will never have to toe a precarious line between being a free American scholar and a devoted Persian daughter who goes home to totalitarian Iran twice a year to visit her 93-year-old mother.
But which of us cannot put himself or herself in the shoes of Madeleine McCann’s parents and which of us does not remember being a helpless child?

Surely there’s a lesson here for all marketers (of anything, whether product or idea). The lesson is this: nothing beats a great story (in which category I include heartbreaking, sad, horrifying, etc.). We will give you our momentary attention pretty readily if you make enough noise (for example: if you say something totally outrageous, like what Jimmy Carter said about Tony Blair the other day, we’ll notice). But if you want to get through to us, give us a story we can relate to at gut level.

Give us a story that no amount of cynicism or jadedness or ironic detachment can protect us from and we are your slaves.

Indeed, a lot of people became slaves to that story. The Herald continues [e.a.]:

The McCanns are partly to blame. Well-educated doctors, they have hired spin doctors and tried to harness the media to their cause. Their stated reason is understandable: they want to keep the focus on finding their daughter.

But the journalist Matthew Parris wrote in The Spectator last week that their savvy media strategy - down to Gerry McCann’s daily blog and constant photos of Kate McCann clutching Madeleine’s pink cuddle-cat - was starting to hurt them. With both reporters and the public alert and resistant to spin, the McCanns had proved “unwisely media-wise”

That seems to be an understatement, considering the backlash that has swept over the McCanns. The Herald’s James Button makes an important point [e.a.]:

[W]e have learnt a few things about the media and their relationship with the public - all of us.

I do not mean simply mainstream media, but the online world of websites, bloggers and instant public feedback. The old and new media have not just reported the McCann story. They have changed it.

Indeed, the media became an actor in the story and nudged it along on an arc that no one could predict and, worse for the McCanns, that no one could control. As they inevitably lost control of their story, it overtook them.

The harsh truth is that when you live by media, you walk the razor’s edge. The rewards of launching a PRopaganda ^TM campaign are potentially very high, as Former Spook reminds us here, discussing the media consultant hired by the diaper-wearing Astro-nut Lisa Nowak:

In a “sample” chapter from the book (posted on her firm’s website), Mackenzie claims that her efforts helped a convicted killer avoid the death penalty; more astonishingly, her fees in that case were paid for by the taxpayers of Florida, after a public defender successfully petitioned to court to add a p.r. specialist to the defense team.

However, in this era of “celebrity justice,” Nowak’s decision to hire a spin doctor is a shrewd move, indeed. The disgraced former astronaut understands that a skilled defense lawyer, aided by an equally competent “image” specialist, can go a long way toward an acquittal, or at least, a hung jury. In the case of Lisa Nowak, Mr. Lykkebak is already hammering away at the credibility of police officers who handled her arrest.

But the risks of things spinning out of control are potentially greater, as the McCanns can now attest, as sympathy for their loss has now apparently turned to revulsion at their very presence:

The online public, however, has been far more hostile. When the Daily Mail last week ran an article, “McCanns’ DNA dossier to demolish Portuguese police’s ‘pathetic’ evidence”, the 60 readers who emailed feedback to this positive story came out two to one against the McCanns.

Evi Labi of London wrote: “It’s terrible for a child to disappear but would it be possible to get some peace from the McCanns’ organised and very well-orchestrated publicity?”

A newspaper in the McCanns’ county of Leicestershire had to close an online discussion forum because of vicious comments about the couple. More than 17,000 people signed an online petition asking social workers to find the McCanns unfit parents to look after their two-year-old twins. An internet poll found that only 20 per cent of Britons thought they were completely innocent.

A new day has dawned: the words "Muslim" and "terrorism" may not be uttered in the same breath by officialdom in Britain, where—thank goodness!—the War on Terror is no more.

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on ­terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.

Blair, for his part, was rather more pointed in his language on the eve of his departure from office last week (but hasn't been heard from since the new round of terrorist incidents in London and Glasgow, as far as I can determine):

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Not content to blast Islamist-inspired faux grievances, Blair also took aim at the biens-pensants of Britain:

 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.' 

And some of what is said by British officialdom is "loopy-loo" in its bland, bored generalizations about those "criminals" who commit terrorist acts, and its craven gratitude toward the "community leaders" who condemn those acts:

Let us be clear: terrorists are criminals whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religious backgrounds. Terrorists attack the values that are shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities and as individuals we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected. I very much welcome the strong messages of condemnation that we have heard throughout the weekend from community leaders across the country. It is through our unity that the terrorists will eventually be defeated.

As Gateway Pundit reports, the AP is equally straightforward in its reporting on the terrorists:

Diverse group allegedly in British plot
By DAVID RISING, Associated Press Writer

Young Muslim immigrant medical professionals in Britain—a very diverse group indeed!

In an interview, Andrew Breitbart describes the real impact of the digital revolution:

The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.

It seems that if you’ve ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world — whether it be government or corporations — it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it’s a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG’s blog, and MG’s blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ….

Yep. It’s pretty goddamn cool. Not to mention that it’s a bonanza for us news junkies who’ve got something to say:

I’m a news addict, news aficionado …

The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that’s being read inside the major newsrooms in the country — I’d pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it’s all there.

You know that you’re seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You’re like, “Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?” And you start gaining a level of confidence that there’s a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility.

Given that anything’s possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, “Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints.” …

That pretty much describes my experience, and the long, long road I’ve traveled on the Internet, of which I’ve been an officianado aficionado since 1993, when I signed up for my first Pipeline (a local NYC ISP) account, up until today, when I mark sixteen months as a blogger (averaging four link-and content-rich posts a day).

Once, in response to a post by Jeff Jarvis on the topic of who we bloggers are, I left the following comment:

We are longtime thinkers and readers and writers who went to the same schools as MSMers (No insult intended. Some of my best friends are MSMers.) but decided to pursue careers and professions other than journalism. We make our living doing other things, but we continue to read and to be engaged by the dynamic world around us and by the world of ideas. We like to read. We like to write. We like to make fun of what we observe in public life, like in MST3K. We like to debate. We understand rhetoric. We know how to check facts and sources.

It’s not journalism, though–few of us are out there bearing witness or interviewing people or acquiring other primary-source material (although with the advent of podcasting and various blogging consortia, that may be changing).

It’s…I dunno. Maybe blogging is “opinion reporting.”

We’re different from journalists, because we seek to mix it up with our readers. We’re looking for conversation and debate. We want to be involved in the intellectual/cultural life of our country (such as it is). Some of us are tired of shouting back at the talking heads on TV and NPR and at editorial writers and columnists. We have areas of expertise and opinions, too.

The blogosphere is where thinking people go to debate the politics of the day, the ideas of public intellectuals, and the opinions of paid opinion writers. It’s where the national conversation is taking place. Be there or be square.

Here’s more from that inspiring Breitbart interview:

Q: You create your own news wire.

A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don’t have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, “You know more about this than our president does,” and hire them for $75,000 a year.

It seems that there’s been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country — there’s no taxation of it — all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.

It’s very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you’d see a bloody revolution.

Q: People would fight for their online freedom.

A: Right. To many people, it’s everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s pretty goddamn cool. And it’s definitely liberating.

I can’t tell whose NYT coverage of the ascension of Sarkozy is more breathless, that of MoDo or that of longtime Europe correspondent Elaine Sciolino.

I know! I’ll let you be in judge. In fact, we’ll have a little contest.

Is it Dowd or is it Sciolino?

Dressed in a sleeveless, shiny, champagne-colored dress designed by Prada, Mrs. Sarkozy, 49, and the children lined up for the cameras on the red carpet leading into the palace.

Olivier Laban-Mattei / AFP / Getty

Inside, the Sarkozys made several public displays of affection, squelching the rumors — at least for now — that they were no longer a couple. He kissed her on the cheek under the glare of the television cameras. At another point, he approached her and touched her cheek.

At a celebratory reception after he officially took office as president, she returned the affection. He leaned over to peck her on the cheek, but she turned to face him, planting a kiss on his lips.

Such a display was out of the question during Mr. Chirac’s presidency: he and his wife have such a formal relationship that they call each other “vous,” even in private.

Okay, okay—it’s Sciolino who’s gaga over the Sarko and Cécilia Show. Which is kind of amazing, because she’s a fairly sober reporter. Here’s Dowd yesterday. You can barely tell the difference.

Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject.

Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.

Cécilia left Sarko for several months in 2005, moving to America to live with a French events organizer — reportedly a response to her husband’s affair with a French journalist.

When Paris Match published pictures of Cécilia with her lover in New York, Sarko became furious with his good friend, Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner. Soon, the editor was fired.

Mr. Lagardère stepped in again to kill a story in another publication he owns, Le Journal du Dimanche. On Sunday, the paper was going to reveal that Cécilia did not bother to vote.

On the night Sarko won the presidency, Parisians were watching Cécilia’s every move. She was not there when he won or when he made his acceptance speech, and some of her friends were saying that the marriage was over.

But her two pretty blonde daughters from a previous marriage apparently prevailed on her to show up later that night at a victory rally. She came dressed down in a gray sweater and white slacks, in what one friend said had originally been her “escape outfit,” and looked distracted as her husband spoke, plucking at her sweater.

At the post-rally party, Paris Match — now following the Sarko script — was given an exclusive on their happy reunion. They were in a hotel suite, the magazine said, behaving “like lovers.”

“And the new president, regaining for an instant the taste of rhythm that invaded him in his youth, took a step in dance,” the story said. “In front of all their friends reunited, he dances for a single person: Cécilia.”

Hallelujah! fresh meat for the global infotainment grinder!

For those of you who just can’t get enough color commentary:

Mr. Sarkozy appeared oddly ill at ease as the outgoing president guided his inexperienced successor up the steps. Mr. Sarkozy tried to regain the advantage by placing his hand on Mr. Chirac’s shoulder, but the choreography failed to work.

The body language spoke volumes about the tension that has characterized the two men’s relationship over the past three decades, despite efforts to bury their differences in the final weeks. The pair then spent half an hour in a private meeting in which the new president received the nuclear codes that permit him to launch a strike within a minute.

Mr. Sarkozy’s speech was heartfelt, if punctuated by nervous tics and shoulder shrugs that betrayed what his enemies claim is a worrying lack of self-control.

Mr. Sarkozy’s mother, Andrée, sat in a throne-like chair. His once estranged father, Pal, a minor Hungarian aristocrat, was also present. He is believed to have been reunited with his son only very recently. His desertion of the family and reported warning to little Nicolas that he would never amount to much is said to have sparked his son’s burning ambition.

After the pathos, the passion: Mr. Sarkozy planted a kiss on the lips of Cecilia — whose absence during the campaign had fueled rumors that the couple was going through fresh marital problems — and gave her cheek an affectionate squeeze. Then, under the glare of the cameras, it was her turn to surprise him with kiss on the lips. It is not known whether Cecilia and the children will move into the Elysée Palace with her husband.

Meanwhile, however, back at the ranch, dark plots are being hatched:

An Al-Qaeda front group in Europe has apparently threatened to launch bloody attacks in France in response to the election of “crusader and Zionist” Nicolas Sarkozy as president.

A statement posted on the internet on Tuesday purporting to be from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades claimed the group would soon carry out attacks in Paris.

“As you have chosen the crusader and Zionist Sarkozy as a leader … we in the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades warn you that the coming days will see a bloody jihadist campaign … in the heart of Sarkozy’s capital,” the group’s “Europe division” said in a statement addressed to the French people.

C’est la vie!