Here’s one of the shrewdest takes on Elizabeth Edwards’s behavior in the unfortunate incident involving her weasel of a husband, from Hanna Rosin at the XX Factor [e.a.]:

I find this Elizabeth Edwards post on Daily Kos excruciating. We are supposed to ride with this couple through her cancer diagnosis and relapse, through their son’s death, their fertility treatments, and the rededication of their marriage, but then we are supposed to butt the hell out when the story line veers from the tragedy and heroics. If you believe in a system, you have to live and die by it. Elizabeth Edwards buys into the culture of overconfession. She is an obsessive blogger, for God’s sake. You can’t just get suddenly pissed off because the confessional culture came back to bite you. A “string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication”???

Yes, that was a huge mistake on the part of the Edwardses. It was they who put their great marriage front and center in his campaign, as Kaus wrote recently, when he was explaining why it’s important for the MSM to cover this story.:

Edwards’ most effective anecdote this year, however, was probably the story of his popular wife Elizabeths’ struggle against cancer. He made it the emotional center of a TV ad:

And Elizabeth and I decided in the quiet of a hospital room, after 12 hours of tests and after getting very bad news, what we were going to spend our lives doing. For all those that have no voice. We are not going to quietly go away.

During a joint 60 Minutes interview focusing on his wife’s illness, Edwards explicitly linked his behavior in that struggle and his fitness for public office:

Katie Couric:
Some have suggested that you’re capitalizing on this.

John Edwards:
Here’s what I would say about that.

First of all, there’s not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer. Not a one. ..[snip]

But, I think every single candidate for president, Republican and Democratic have lives, personal lives, that indicate something about what kind of human being they are. And I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we’d make. [E.A.]

Once Edwards brought America into his family’s private hell, all other bets were off and there was no more “zone of privacy.”

Soon it won’t only be the tabloids snooping into politicians’ affairs. This is the era of the citizen journalist, after all. And if the mainstream media proves itself too squeamish or “high-class” to report on these kinds of things—which involve lies, cover-ups, hush money, personal betrayals, and which speak directly to the issue of character—you can be sure after this major breach of the public trust from a former presidential candidate and his wife, a lot of freelancers will be operating in this territory from now on.

The public may not have a “right” to know, but the public wants to know the whole story—including the sordid stuff. Fairy tales they can get in People magazine. They want the full range of possible fabrications and truths about celebrities (and politicians), including the dirt.

Those mischievous folks at Gawker say that Obama is more popular than Jesus and Angelina Jolie, and they’ve got the evidence:

Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone again! So soon after the last one. And just one week after he showed up on the front of publisher Jann Wenner’s UsWeekly!

Well, I have it on good (perhaps!) authority that “Nothing sells like celebrity,” and Barack Obama is the Messiah of celebrities and all other correct-thinking Americans.

If at first you don’t succeed—and the first round of press for Michelle Obama in February (which included an interview on Larry King, profiles in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as the New York Times and the WSJ) was a resounding failure, since it was totally overshadowed by “undernews” [i.e., "gossip" about the chip on her shoulder]—try, try again:

The campaign to soften her hard edges is in full swing. Today she was on The View—and event that was live-blogged by reporters for the New York Times—and today her struggle to build a better media image for herself is also analyzed in a front-page puff piece (er, I mean “report”) in the NYT.

Whatevs. She’s the wife of a presidential nominee, and might well become First Lady. We all need to get used to her, at the very least …

Question of the day: Can someone be both overexposed and unknown? (Answer: no. She is known [and overexposed] in a way the campaign doesn’t want her to be known, so they’re trying to rebrand her.)

Bonus question: Has the Obama campaign read Matthew Baum’s research about “soft news” being a good place to reach “low information voters”? (I’ve written about this here and here.) It sure seems like it, since this relaunch of Michelle includes primarily the “soft news”—and I use the word “news” advisedly—outlets (like The View and US magazine).

Final question of the day: Doesn’t anyone else wonder where the Obamas’ number-one champion

has been lurking since her candidate’s triumph? I detect the (invisible) hand—or at least the method—of Oprah behind the Oprahfication of Michelle.

[updated (twice) with some missing links]

As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.

But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).

Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.

Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).

Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.

So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***

[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.

For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.

And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:

If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.

So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)

Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).

Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:

• Nick Denton at 01:20 PM on 06/05/08

  Connectedness Index: 1764

  @Choire: The entangling of literary, journalistic and romantic relationships is a topic worthy of Gawker. You can’t understand how the media works unless you know who dated whom. Every job, every magazine commission, every anonymous quote, every resentment-they can only be fully understood if you know that X went to school with Y who introduced them to Z who commissioned X to write that magazine piece which turned into a book contract lined up by Y’s former lover. When you and I chat over lunch, that’s how we talk. Why should all this information be reserved for the private conversations of media insiders? That’s why Gawker exists: to put all of that invaluable social information out on the web and make the media machine a little less monolithic and intimidating than it can so often seem.

Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

Here:

[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

And here:

[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.

It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:

something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:

Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.

“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”

The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.

For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:

Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.

And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]

Interesting times indeed.

update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.

Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.” 

———————–

*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)

As Politico notes, Obama asked for it, and he got it—evidence for all to see that, like every other politician known to man (and woman), he is a liar:

[youtube][/youtube]

I mention this, and not Hillary Clinton’s repeated lies, because we all expect Clinton to lie. She’s a Clinton, after all, and is advised by the former Liar-in-Chief. Her lying isn’t newsworthy.

When Obama lies, however—and when he challenges his interlocutor to prove him wrong and the cyber elves do prove him wrong and the rest of us then spread it around for everyone to see—well, then Obama loses.

If his genius campaign manager David Axelrod hadn’t created a totally false image of Obama the Messiah, none of this would matter now. But because he launched a celebrity with a halo instead of a warts-and-all politician, his client will continue to have problems.

Or so I think. We shall see.

Al Gore will launch a $300 million campaign whose sole purpose is to influence public opinion.

“The whole idea of the campaign is to be inclusive and to be bipartisan and to bring people together to a place where meaningful change can happen,” an organizer said. “It aims to be a game-changer in terms of the politics of climate.”

I wasn’t in fact aware that there is a “politics of climate.” I thought climate is a given. Of nature.  Foolish me!

Fun with Obama iconography:

Based on their latest cover, here’s a short list of who Rolling Stone thinks Barack Obama is:

–The totally awesome, glowing, superhero/savior spawn of Jesus and Superman

–A dewy Venus, majestically stepping forth from a serene ocean mist, but, like also a guy who’s running for president.

–Not just the president of the ShinySuit 3000 Club For Men, but also a client.

(via the BlogFather, Glenn Reynolds)

p.s. I haven’t check out Tim Noah’s place to see if he’s added it to his Obama Messiah Watch series.

Those of you who are interested in going deep in the weeds of Obama Messiah iconography should visit this blog.

update: the McCain-endorsement story has legs 

I’m struck by some very different reactions to the major political endorsements of the last couple of days, both of which I would categorize as major PRopaganda^TM events.

When Barack Obama was crowned by the Kennedy family on Monday at a rally at Washington American University in Washington, D.C. (ETP’s Rachel Sklar delivered a flavor of the ambience here), I didn’t hear a lot of objections to the adulatory press coverage, of Google News offered one small sample:

Windsor Star

Sen. Kennedy endorses Obama for president
Kansas City Star, MO - Jan 29, 2008
By MARGARET TALEV With nostalgic references to his assassinated brother, President John F. Kennedy, liberal icon Sen. Edward Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama …
Video: Raw Video: Governor Speaks About Kennedy Endorsements Obama Hopes to Reap Benefits of Kennedy Presidential Endorsement Voice of America
Ted Kennedy endorses Obama Jamaica Gleaner
CNN - Reuters UK
all 1,302 news articles »

By contrast, on the next night, while anchoring Florida primary coverage on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann set the deeply disapproving—if not outraged—tone for liberals when he heard that Rudy Giuliani would be endorsing John McCain the next day. (I wrote about it here, as I watched K.O.’s creepazoid performance. He also dissed Hillary Clinton by saying that her primary victory in Florida was “meaningless.”)

I wasn’t around to watch the Republicans’ piece of political theater (live, from the Reagan Library) the next day (you can watch it here), but The Flack offered his professional color commentary:

He ran a losing campaign with more than his share of PR gaffes.

Yet, as I sit here watching Rudy Giuliani’s withdrawal and endorsement speech, I can’t help but think how he timed this anti-climactic announcement to run live on the local TV network lead-ins across most of the nation. Geesh. He finally did something right on the media strategy front. [e.a.]

The Flack is impressed professionally but appalled personally:

The nation’s local TV news directors took the bait — hook, line and sinker — to hand over to this right wing ideologue unfettered access to a large hunk of their news programming holes. The Giuliani withdrawal speech morphed into a several-minute commercial for that pasty, anachronistic candidate who has stood by this failed presidency more than any other. [e.a.]

I’m left with the impression that if local TV news directors had handed over unfettered access to a left-wing ideologue, everything would have been just fine and dandy—from both a professional and a personal point of view.

Because I wasn’t around to watch TV during either of those live events and I don’t have the time to research how much airtime either of them got and on which channels, I can’t parse which PRopaganda^TM event got “fairer” treatment by the media. Nor do I care.

I get the Rudy hatred.*** What I don’t get is the attitude that TV programmers somehow shouldn’t have given airtime to strategists who came up with a very effective PR campaign, regardless of its content.

“Free media” is free to those who can grab it, no? The competition’s PR “consiglieres” just have to try harder, that’s all. It’s the American way!

———-

*** Though I don’t share it. He did a lot of good things for New York while haranguing us with his in-your-face law-and-orderism, which during Election ‘08 has been characterized as “Rudy is a fascist.” Been there, done that. Whatever.

Personally, I welcome what I see as a trend toward moderation in the Republican Party that the rise of McCain and Giuliani signals—I hope it means a trend of having opponents across the aisle that Democrats can work with.

I also agree that Giuliani has run a campaign of ideas—and that unlike his opponents on the Republican side, he has ideas.

But I know that partisanship trumps everything right now. Oh well.

From Sundance (where, the NYT reports, there’s “Caution in the Air”) an icepick to the heart (if s/he has one) of any PR professional in Hollywood (and elsewhere):

[ Mr. Bernard of Sony Classics] also questioned whether the old methods of generating hype to drive a bidding war had perhaps outlived their usefulness.

In the well-received documentary “American Teen,” he noted, a photograph of a girl’s breasts is circulated to her classmates in a matter of hours. “It’s sort of like that here,” Mr. Bernard said. “I had to leave ‘What Just Happened?’ early to go meet a director, and where I was, these bloggers were getting text messages about how the movie was playing, while it was still playing. In a sense, the press is too immediate for the sellers, because they can’t really dupe people anymore.”

This sounds like an insular problem for Hollywood dealmakers, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all learn from this apparent limit to hype’s effectiveness—since we live in a world ruled by hype (what I have referred on this blog as PRopaganda^TM).

First, as I’ve noted repeatedly, most recently here, people have a strong desire to believe.

Also: bad buzz alone is never the single cause of failure.

Bad buzz is merely the planting of a negative opinion or of a seed of doubt. The seedbed it lands on must be receptive to the idea that’s planted, or to doubt. Furthermore, for that seed to spread, the soil around it must be fertile.

And then, of course, there must be some semblance of truth to the claim that’s being spread. (Buzz is only buzz, after all; it’s not the real thing—it’s someone’s opinion about the thing.)

Finally, bad buzz can be topped by new good buzz (as the father of PR noted).

The audience, which has a strong desire to believe (even if it is fragmented), will always be receptive to buzz, bad or good. All you need to do is find your target audience and then capture their attention. At the right moment.

Somehow, all this stuff is connected. One day I’ll figure out how to write about it.

That’s an interesting gambit from Hillary, no? It leaves her wide open to attack from her Democratic opponents.

Or, rather, it should have, as Keith Olbermann kept arguing (incoherently, as usual) last night:

OLBERMANN: But to that point, Howard, at the end of this debate, with about 10 minutes to go, Brian Williams gave Barack Obama, opened the door for him to go after [interesting point you make about that assist, Mr. Olbermann  ---ed.], to go after Hillary Clinton on an issue that has been hugely important and hugely felt personally by most Democrats, and most people who have been critical of the administration, this whole question of reading her quote back to her before the vote in New Hampshire about the so-called Gordon Brown question. The implication, several lengths removed, but the implication nonetheless kind of milder Democratic version of the same language that was used by, has been used by so many Republicans since 9/11, and particularly in the campaigns of 2004 and 2006, why when this issue of, you know, this hint, maybe Obama would not be as ready as Clinton would be to handle a sudden terrorist attack after the inaugural next January, why was Senator Obama’s response, I understand why his responses were controlled and statesmanlike on these, you know, personal issues, but why was he somewhat controlled? Why didn’t he, you know, take, go run right through that door that was opened for him?

HOWARD FINEMAN: He was sort of tiptoeing halfway through the door. I think he … had in his mind, you know, Axelrod and all the other [advisers] saying, you know, don’t go after her too hard, be careful, you’re at close range, you’ve had all those other problems. I think that’s a big vulnerability that Clinton has. She can be accused of trying to play the fear card, and I think Obama was afraid to do it too frontally. It’s hard to do it in those circumstances. I’m sure you’re going to hear it on the campaign trail over the next few days.

OLBERMANN: Yeah, but Jonathan, why, if a candidate says, sitting next to you or a million miles away, Jonathan, if somebody says to you, you know, my implication here, that was in this statement that you would not be ready to deal with this, but I would, on such a vital issue, you have two options. One is to refute that, and refute it strongly. And the other one is just to say, “Listen, never mind what you’re saying, this is not the way we should be doing business as Democrats.” Why didn’t Barack Obama take that opportunity when it was presented to him?

Good question, K.O. But why keep asking it after Fineman clearly said that Obama was afraid to take her on?

This is a very smart—though obviously very risky (because it further alienates her from her party’s base, which downplays external threats to America as “Republican talking points”)—maneuver from Hillary. It changes the conversation and clearly distinguishes her from Obama; and, from an impression-management point of view (which is most important of all, as JFK wrote in 1959*** and demonstrated in his subsequent campaign) shows that she is willing and able to confront her opponents (be they Republican or, say, Iranian) head-on.

This kind of impression management couldn’t be more important in the national election. As Arianna Huffington wrote yesterday, Iraq and the “war on terrorism” are still major concerns for the electorate. Today, she’s declaring Hillary the winner in the debate last night and encouraging Hillary to stay on this theme. (I don’t know why Arianna is taking this pro-Hillary stance. I thought she was a Hillary hater. Goes to show you how much I know. I haven’t been following along to see who in the media is on whose side in the campaign.)

Anyhow, bottom line: Rhetoric is marvelous. It is not sufficient. Talk is cheap.

—————-

*** It’s a marvelous and prescient piece, and it was originally published before Daniel Boorstin’s landmark book The Image. And Kennedy’s piece appeared in TV Guide.

I hope to have time to write more about this …eventually. Meanwhile, here are some excerpts:

The wonders of science and technology have revolutionized the modern American political campaign. Giant electronic brains project results on the basis of carefully conducted polls…. Jet planes make possible a coast-to-coast speaking schedule no observation-car back platform could ever meet. …Even wash-and-wear fabrics permit the wilted nonstop candidate to travel lighter, farther and faster.

But nothing compares with the revolutionary impact of television. …

The searching eye of the television camera scrutinizes the candidates-and the way they are picked. Party leaders are less willing to run roughshod over the voters’ wishes and hand-pick an unknown, unappealing or unpopular in the traditional “smoke-filled room” when millions of voters are watching, comparing and remembering.  …

Honesty, vigor, compassion, intelligence-the presence or lack of these and other qualities make up what is called the candidate’s “image.” While some intellectuals and politicians may scoff at these “images”-and while they may in fact be based only on a candidate’s TV impression, ignoring his record, views and other appearances-my own conviction is that these images or impressions are likely to be uncannily correct. I think, no matter what their defenders or detractors may say, that the television public has a fairly good idea of what Dwight D. Eisenhower is really like-or Jimmy Hoffa-or John McClellan- or Vice President Nixon-or countless others.

This is why a new breed of candidates has sprung up on both the state and national levels. Republican Governors Rockefeller (New York) and Hatfield (Oregon) successfully countered the Democratic trend in 1958 with particular reliance on TV appeal.

Sarkozy loses it, or abandons himself to the moment—take your pick. A tabloid tale made in heaven, courtesy of the Daily Mail:

Sarkozy’s fiancee ‘pregnant’ as ex Cecilia delivers blistering attack on couple

Sarkozy is “ridiculous, badly behaved and not fit to be president” Cecilia Sarkozy says in a new book, adding for good measure that the women in his life are just a “bunch of slappers” (or des petasses fardees, as the French would have it).

Even the president’s female political colleagues do not escape her barbed tongue: they are just “boring wallflowers, and now that there is no First Lady, he needs to surround himself with pretty young things dressed in Dior”.

It has taken just a few short weeks for the revenge of Cecilia to begin.

Sarkozy, 52, began dating Bruni, 40, just one month after his divorce from Cecilia following a 12-year marriage and his election last May as France’s new president.

Now it is Carla who stays with the president at the Elysee Palace and has been given a £10,000 ring - embarrassingly similar to one he once bought Cecilia.

Very juicy and totally sensationalistic as told by the Mail.

In the New York Times this past week, Sarkozy himself suggested that he’s being very 21st-century:

Sarkozy Says Press Is Free to Ignore His Personal Life

“I didn’t want to lie,” Mr. Sarkozy said of his romance with Ms. Bruni. “And I am breaking with a deplorable tradition in our political life — that of hypocrisy, that of lies.” …

“Really, truly, and it is very satisfying for me, France is moving forward,” he said, his words tumbling out in incomplete sentences. “What was hidden under a mantle of secrecy for one of my predecessors — whom I will not judge — everyone must live as he sees fit.”

It’s nutty, but I’m gonna have to go with Sarkozy here, because of his real defense, which he said just after “everyone must live as he sees fit”:

“Life is so difficult and so painful.”

Indeed, and he wants to feel good. He’s got the right to do it. However, as the much more sensationalistic but also more informative Daily Mail piece tell us, Sarkozy’s behavior affects not only his popularity at home but also France’s relations abroad:

Aside from any pregnancy, a speedy wedding would also mark the end of headaches for protocol planners in foreign countries Sarkozy plans to visit, though he might still be a bachelor when he goes to Saudi Arabia and India later this month.

Dominique Moisin, of the French Institute of International Relations, szaid: “The sooner they marry, the sooner the presidency’s dignity will be restored. …
Sarkozy was disappointed that the Pope declined to receive him with his new girlfriend. Under Vatican protocol it was deemed “inappropriate” for a head of state to meet the pontiff on an official visit, accompanied by a girlfriend.

Meanwhile, the Indian government, which is receiving Sarkozy as a guest of honour at the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January 24, has released a half-hearted statement, saying: “It is for the French to decide whether Miss Bruni should be treated as First Lady or not”.

It will be fascinating to see what happens when Sarkozy arrives in Britain for the state visit in March. Since the Entente Cordiale - the end of centuries of war between Britain and France - was signed in 1904 every French leader on a state visit has been accompanied by a First Lady.

So, yeah. He’s got a right to personal happiness, but we’ll see if he manages to hold on to the respect that a politician with his global ambitions needs in order to effect his agenda.

Or perhaps that time has passed into oblivion.

We do live in interesting times, don’t we?

The Flack passes along the news (from Newsweek) that al Qaeda’s main spokesman, Zawahiri, feeling burned by the media, is trying another tack—he’s now making himself available for long-distance interviews by journalists, via email questions submitted to al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahaab (The Cloud).

Newsweek rightly labels this a publicity tactic, and it’s a shrewd one, because it garners al Qaeda a different kind of global media attention from what they’re used to [e.a.]:

This is the first time Al Qaeda has made a formal call to journalists, although it will not be the first time the radical Islamic group has granted interviews to Western media. Counterterrorism experts believe that the posting is genuine and that it is part of Al Qaeda’s evolving tactics to use the Web as part of its propaganda arsenal. “This is a continuation of the efforts by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership to push themselves forward in the public viewpoint,” says Maj. Reid Sawyer, editor of “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” and a lecturer of terrorism studies at Columbia University

Zawahiri hopes to put himself on equal footing with world leaders by doing an “Al Qaeda Press Avail,” as the Flack calls it. As a PR pro, he’s calling bullshit on it [e.a.].

By feigning media access, the organization cultivates an image of civilized engagement among the unsuspecting masses, all the while perpetrating or planning unspeakable actions.

“Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst now in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes this as playing to the YouTube generation. ‘It completely fits Al Qaeda’s communications strategy over the past two years, which is how to get people more invested in the movement.’”

And Zawahiri is not alone in gaming the court of public opinion by playing the “freedom of the press” card. A free media today seems more of a propaganda tool and less of a requirement to qualify as a modern society.

The Flack is certainly right to note that all kinds of international players are now gaming the court of public opinion. I wouldn’t characterize our free media as a propaganda tool, though, but rather as a rich propaganda outlet or channel-–one that the world’s most mischievous and/or bad actors (dictators and/or theocratic totalitarians) are very savvy about exploiting via PRopaganda^TM (PR-fueled “dramatic narratives”) because they are so savvy about actual propaganda in their own autocracies, dictatorships, and/or totalitarian theocracies.

Influencing public opinion is a black art in totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is often subtle. (Even autocrats and theocrats find that it is much more effective to persuade the people to come around to their point of view than it is to have to police them and punish them all the time. Understandably, people get impatient and upset with that kind of violence and will try to revolt. So if you want to suppress them and keep them pacified, you have to be less obvious about your control over them, more refined, more convincing. Dictatorships that want to last need the silent consent of their people, so they spend an inordinate amount of time building theories and revisionist histories and other narratives that “justify” their existence. These narratives are constantly “streamed” through their societies—via textbooks, classrooms, party conference papers, academia, and of course the media, which is controlled by the state.)

Of course the world’s bad guys are going to have superlative media skills.

The Flack writes:

Think Putin, Ahmadinejad, Assad and all the other despots who’ve gutted their nation’s free media, without any real retribution.

Well, not quite. These men haven’t gutted their nations’ free media. What free media? Iran has no free media. Syria has no free media. Russia has only a nominally free media since Putin took power.

The absence of freedom (of the press, among other things) in these countries—and the (dictatorial, theocratic, autocratic, or totalitarian) mode of power their leaders hold over their people—is exactly the problem with them.

It’s important that American media organizations and media-related professionals understand how easy it is for them to be used as propaganda outlets by the world’s bad actors.

But if execs like CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for example, are any indication, our media conglomerates are so uninterested in the content of what they air (as long as it brings in plenty of dough) that they notoriously turn a blind eye to the beyond-the-news-cycle impact of glorifying, say, Vladimir Putin:

Platon for TIME

The NYT’s David Carr makes it sound easy:  Stay out of the spotlight! [e.a.]

If Ms. Regan and the News Corporation don’t settle, the discovery and trial could be embarrassing. …

It’s not that her particular claims about the News Corporation have to stick. Pull back the blankets on any enterprise — the book business, the movie business, what the heck, the news business — and some common industry practices are not going to look so good in the cold light of the courtroom. She was in a position to know a lot, and she may be in the mood to tell all of it.

“We don’t know the truth of the various allegations, but other things may come out that are not directly related to what she is suing for,” said Mark C. Zauderer, a Manhattan trial lawyer. “You have to consider the financial exposure versus the reputational exposure of not settling.”

Carr suggests that it’s NewsCorp. which will suffer embarrassment.

So before News Corporation executives decide to tangle with Ms. Regan in court, perhaps they should remember why they hired her in the first place.

Um, no. Rupert Murdoch, his reputation as a bottom feeder cemented, cannot possibly be embarrassed. It’s the reputation of HarperCollins that’s at stake here, and publishers don’t really need bad publicity, because their business is under enough pressure as is.

But publishers do seem a tad dazed and confused about the darn pace of things these days. Why, Peter Osnos was amazed that a feeding frenzy erupted over catalog copy from a book he plans to publish in April 2008:

[W]hat was amazing about the response was that it became a huge story before anyone pursued its context. …

The first reaction to the excerpt was that McClellan, by saying they were “involved,” was accusing the president and vice-president of deliberate deception. The rejoicing among administration critics was palpable. Senators Schumer and Dodd and the outed Valerie Plame herself were immediately available to denounce the president. …

We conferred with McClellan and decided that he was better off working on his book than grappling with the media (I did not immediately realize that there was a firestorm on the Web and cable …) I explained [to the media] that … the full story must await publication.

The backlash then ensued … [T]he newspaper Web sites, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, joined in the fray with blog entries and chat sessions conveying full sound and fury and the “deflating” fact that McClellan was not accusing the president of deliberate deception.

And the meaning of it all?

Scott McClellan is writing a responsible book about his moment in history. Much of our popular media, including some leading brand names, apparently shoot first and ask later. The blogosphere and cable news operate in a universe of their own in which frenzy and vituperation are the major currency.

Well, yes: the public is eager for new entertainments, so the guardians of the court of public opinion—the media—needs a constant supply of grist for the mill. Of course they get all frenzied and vituperative. Everybody knows that.

The days of old-fashioned publicity campaigns and fancy, newfangled rollouts—controlled and controllable—are over.

No one has yet managed to harness the power of a viral media frenzy to benefit him/herself: the results are too unpredictable. That’s why everyone is—or should be—cautious about getting into the spotlight.

Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

So. I’m back and I’m mellow—probably because I have studiously avoided catching up on the blogospheric eruptions that I missed while I was away (though I did follow the news, at a vast remove, in the International Herald Tribune, which, shockingly, costs € 2,20 [approx $3.10]; more later on following the news at a vast remove).

Among others, I had P. G. Wodehouse for company on my European idyll, and these words, from Psmith in the City, written in 1910, also helped to lighten my mood [e.a.]:

All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. …

The electors of Kenningford who really had any definite opinions on politics were fairly equally divided. There were about as many earnest Liberals as there were earnest Unionists. But besides these there was a strong contingent who did not care which side won. These looked on elections as Heaven-sent opportunities for making a great deal of noise. They attended meetings in order to extract amusement from them; and they voted, if they voted at all, quite irresponsibly. A funny story at the expense of one candidate told on the morning of the polling, was quite likely to send these brave fellows off in dozens filling in their papers for the victim’s opponent.

[Penguin; pp. 56-57]

In 1910, there was no Feiler Faster Thesis to explain (courtesy of Mickey Kaus) that candidates (and their campaign strategists) needn’t fret about not having enough time to connect with voters.

Even a century ago it was understood that only at the last minute do voters give political campaigns their

allotted minute and a half of concentrated thought.

Except: even a century ago Wodehouse knew that the great unwashed among voters don’t give candidates their thought.

They vote with their gut.

And they are likely to be swayed not by facts but by—dare I say it?—infotainment [that is: gossip, rumor, fabrication, PRopaganda^TM or anything else that makes for a more entertaining story than what reality, and a factual rendering of it, can deliver].

Upshot: time isn’t the crucial problem for candidates. As always, perception is the problem. Image is the problem. (Then, of course, there’s the little issue of connecting with the public’s mood.)

It’s not fair.

It’s not right.

It could lead us where we definitely don’t want to go.

It’s likely to offer dismal results for those of us “earnest Liberals” who want to vote for Obama—or, rather, to live in a world where Obama’s views hold sway.

But that’s the way it is.

Time magazine’s Richard Stengel first exposes to the light of day Ahmadinejad’s formidable PR campaign and then acts as a force multiplier for it by falling—hard—for the charm offensive:

The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran “requests the pleasure” of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. …There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There’s Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down. …

This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket. And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience.

Hmmm. Angenlina Jolie is of course a gorgeous movie star, so I can see why the press slavers over her. But what’s Stengel’s excuse for drooling all over Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance when he is a seasoned reporter, who is expected—and paid—to be shrewd, skeptical, and analytical? And, of course, when the stakes are considerably higher than merely giving devoted attention—and a platform—to a run-of-the-mill fame whore.

When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently.

Why, his manners were impeccable, in contrast to our rudeness! And surely that’s all that matters when everything else out of his mouth is an odious lie!

Early on—before the “how ruuuuude” meme broke out in the MSM—George Packer had quite a different view on this [e.a.]:

Some Columbia students condemned Bollinger’s withering introduction—as if free speech should also be free of consequences. They didn’t understand that they had just witnessed a small victory for intellectual freedom and liberal values. One student who got the point, Stina Reksten, of Norway, told the Times, “I’m proud of my university today. I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.” Ahmadinejad was given a chance to hold forth, but it was not a free ride. In inviting him, the university didn’t surrender its powers of judgment: his monologue of sophistry and lies was preceded by hard truths. Bollinger demonstrated that universities don’t have to cave in to their critics on either the right or the left—that certain principles are stronger than political opportunism.

I couldn’t agree more. And here’s what one TNR commenter—who has family and friends back in Iran—had to say about that [e.a.]:

I applaud Bollinger’s rudeness, because someone has to be. It sure as hell ain’t gonna be any Iranians - those in Iran are cowed the rest of us abroad have families and friends who could be terrorised to buy our silence.

I applaud Bollinger’s candour because for far too long, we in the Liberal West have applied our “notions of hospitality” without once thinking of the broader consequences. How many tyrants and dictators have we coddled out of politeness?

No, Sir: Bollinger was right in bring to Ahmadinejad’s attention what it is that any right-thinking man or woman finds offensive about him. And, in fact, he got the answer he was hoping for, the supreme expression of Ahmadinejad’s stupidity: “there are no homosexuals in Iran, not like here.” In a sense, of course, he is right - “not like here” - because they get hanged; but it was the broader implication that was the issue, and he got the response he deserved in the laughter and sniggers of the audience.

It is not necessary to [overanalyse] what happened. Columbia should not have invited the jackass; having done so, it should not have molly-coddled him. And Ahmadinejad should know next time not to accept invitations such as this, or expect brutal candour.

Indeed.

But ETP’s Rachel Sklar had by far the best angle on this story—on what a snooze it must have been for the participants to spend hours and hours in that room while A’jad and 23 academics droned on and on.

So that puts Ahmadinejad opening his mouth to speak at about 9pm. By now, dinner is long gone, so you can’t even toy with food on your plate. You may be on your second, third, fourth cup of tea and/or water, just because it’s in front of you. Are you allowed to leave the room to go to the bathroom, or will that offend His Craziness? (But if you do go to the bathroom, at least you can be sure that no one from the Iranian delegation will play footsie with you in the stall, ’cause they don’t have gay people there). Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad is just now warming up, “with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi.” Aaaaah can this even be distilled to a soundbite? I would be pinching my thighs under the table to stay awake at this point.

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.