Entries Tagged 'fan behavior' ↓

One of Glenn Reynolds’s emailers describes Obama-swooners as your typical fans—wrestling fans, that is [e.a.]:

I am in medical school now, but I remember when I used to watch the WWF (WWE as it is called now) about 10 years ago and I have to say Obama’s victory/campaign speech tonight in Virginia is utterly reminiscent of any “face” (good guy) speech as he arrived in the ring in a new town.

“My it’s good to be back to (insert city/state)…I’ll tell you you guys have the best (insert sports team/governor)…” the speech then goes on about being an underdog and more importantly winning against the odds et cetera, et cetera. The best part about it is that the crowd in both instances, fake wrestling and politics, always screams and applauds in the same spots and eventually breaks into chanting the hero’s name. I understand this isn’t a speech meant to unveil any type of policy specifics (when are his speeches ever about that really?) but the similarities were striking for about five minutes.

Just a friendly reminder that depression usually follows mania.

Bush is certainly wasting no time in trying to burst the bubble:

“I certainly don’t know what he believes in. The only foreign policy thing I remember he said was he’s going to attack Pakistan and embrace Ahmadinejad,” Bush said.

Obama hit back, you’ll be happy to know.

“Of course President Bush would attack the one candidate in this race who opposed his disastrous war in Iraq from the start. But Barack Obama doesn’t need any foreign policy advice from the architect of the worst foreign policy decision in a generation,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

He’ll need something better than Kos and Pelosi talking points, though.

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

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.

Mike Huckabee is the new master manipulator, according to two versions of the same story (both by the same writer, Kit Seelye) in the New York Times. Here’s the one that was printed in the dead-tree paper that arrived on my NYC doorstep early this morning [e.a.]:

 In a bizarre bit of political theater, Mike Huckabee told news outlets on Monday that he was not going to broadcast a negative commercial against Mitt Romney, his chief rival in the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa. Then he showed that advertisement to the news media, which in reporting the announcement went on to give his anti-Romney message free publicity while he claimed the moral high ground.

This version—quite negative in tone, no? Note that the political theater is said to be “bizarre” and that Huckabee was “claiming” the moral high ground while rolling around in the mud—also suggests, albeit very tangentially, the author of the successful tactic (Ed Rollins, “the Brawler,” who recently signed on with the Huckabee campaign).

In the Times, Seelye notes, at the end of her piece:

There appeared to have been some dissent in the Huckabee camp over whether to attack Mr. Romney. In an interview last Wednesday, Mr. Huckabee’s longtime campaign manager, Chip Saltzman, insisted the campaign planned to maintain a positive tone until the end. But on the same day, Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican consultant and Mr. Huckabee’s new national campaign chairman, said he expected to begin firing back in a few days.

The other version of the Kit Seelye story, which you can find here (I got the link via Ann Althouse), made no specific mention of the fact that the strategy worked but made it abundantly clear that it had worked:

In an act of political jujitsu, Mike Huckabee has halted a negative ad that he was about to broadcast on television Monday against his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. But while claiming the moral high ground, he proceeded to show the ad to a roomful of reporters, photographers and television cameras who are repeating his anti-Romney message for free while Mr. Huckabee declares that his hands are clean.

The display unfolded at the Marriott Hotel here to the mirth of the journalists who watched Mr. Huckabee’s legerdemain even as they became the conduit for his attacks against Romney.

At the same time, he pointed to media cynicism as the reason he felt compelled to show the ad, saying that unless he showed it, reporters would not believe that it really existed. It criticized Mr. Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, saying he supported gun control, allowed a co-pay for abortions in his health plan, raised taxes and ordered no executions.

This version is a lot softer in tone. For example: “political jujitsu,” like its martial-arts namesake, is an art—something to be admired rather than loathed (like a “bizarre bit of political theater”; see above).

Kinda makes me wonder what happened between these two versions of the story. In any event, however, the strategy worked. 

Huckabee made the news, and the media carried his anti-Romney message. 

In a rare moment of self-reflection from a member of the MSM,  Seelye explains (in the more negative piece) how this happens [e.a.]:

The circumstances of the commercial and the nature of free media, particularly now with YouTube, make it likely that the advertisement will be viewed far more often than if it had simply run. There is a long history of news coverage guaranteeing a commercial publicity that money could not buy.

In 1964, the “daisy” spot, which suggested that Barry Goldwater’s election would lead to nuclear war, was broadcast on television just once. And in 2004, advertisements by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s military record, had a limited run in a few small markets before being widely covered in the press.

If I had one wish for 2008 (and forward), I would wish that everyone in the American media—reporters, pundits, columnists, bloggers, and news and entertainment executives—would get wise to how they always risk being played not just by political enemies at home but also by those abroad: the world’s bad political actors.

I’ve said it before, in “the new season from Al Qaeda Productions,”and I’ll say it again:

 Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co.  … I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage-you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us.

Since our media-saturated world is here to stay, it only makes sense to focus attention on the sophisticated media strategies, PR initiatives, and PRopaganda narratives of any player (whether domestic or foreign) who would make a claim on our attention (which is itself increasingly fractured by the many channels and niches available to us—but that’s a subject for another day).

Players who seek the attention of the media—including especially the world’s bad political actors— have all  learned to market themselves to us as if we were potential fans and customers, and a lot of naive but influential people fall for their act.

We Americans need to be alert to the absence of truth from much of that kind of advertising—particularly as more and more celebrities, who often have a deficit of political sophistication and also have a disproportionate influence on the public, get in on the act.

Dan Drezner recently explained what celebs are up to [e.a.]. 

It sometimes seems as though celebrities today are obsessed with trying to move the global agenda. Like Angelina Jolie. Think of how she’s changed her image since her breakup with Billy Bob Thornton. In February, she published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur. …

Jolie is just one of many star activists. Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow — all have used their celebrity status to push their favored causes in an effort to affect what governments do and say. But why do they do it, and will it work?

Drezner’s focus is on the effectiveness of celebrities’ advocacy on policy decisions (mixed at best, since results—if any—take a long time to show up; change happens slowly in the real world). I’m more interested in their ability to influence public opinion. Drezner explains how they exert their influence—through us, their fans:

[T]he power of soft news has given stars new leverage. Their rising clout has as much to do with how we consume information as it does with the celebrities themselves. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the news sources available to Americans. The more competitive marketplace for news and entertainment affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed.

In Drezner’s formulation, cable TV (which is almost all views and no news), talk radio, and blogs are now news sources. I disagree: they’re spreaders of racy, juicy, dramatic, sensational headlines that provoke strong emotion. They are, in other words, infotainment. But I digress.

My point is that celebrities—because we fall in love with them so easily and can hardly ever fall out of love with them, because it’s their job to seduce us—have an outsize influence in this new universe  of infotainment-masquerading-as-news. We should all be more circumspect about our indiscriminate fandom.

Maybe in the new year I’ll have time to explore this topic some more.