Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce (Oldie)

COMMUNICATION STREAM OF CONSPIRACY COMMERCE: The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce refers to the mode of communication employed by the right wing to convey their fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media. This is how the stream works. First, well funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the internet where they are bounced all over the world. From the internet, the stories are bounced into the mainstream media through one of two ways: 1) The story will be picked up by the British tabloids and covered as a major story, from which the American right-of-center mainstream media (i.e. the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and New York Post) will then pick the story up; or 2) The story will be bounced directly from the internet to the right-of center mainstream American media. After the mainstream right-of-center American media covers the story, Congressional committees will look into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a "real" story.

In order to fully understand the Whitewater story, it is important to understand how conservative groups are, and have been. able to generate a media frenzy over the Whitewater story.

The "Media Food Chain"
The media food chain is the system by which right-wing activists feed conspiracy theories and innuendo from the. fringes into the mainstream media. The "food chain" starts with activists such as Willie Horton creator Floyd Brown, Sheffield Nelson and Larry Nichols. These activists feed the partisan conservative press. publications such as the American Spectator, the Washington Times and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. The mainstream press then picks up on these reports.

The "Blow-Back" Strategy" One specific "food chain" strategy is the "blow-back" The blow-back starts with conservative groups feeding material to the British tabloids, such as the Sunday Telegraph. Conservative American tabloids and mainstream American media then report on the British reports.

What's old is new again. This is a Clinton White House secret memo from 1995 that laid out the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to get "fringe" unconfirmed stories into the mainstream news. Click on the thread link to see the whole memo.

This is what actually played out with the Buzzfeed to CNN story from yesterday.

Washington Post (January 10, 1997) White House Memo Asserts a Scandal Theory

The 332-page report documenting an alleged "conspiracy commerce" of scandalous "fringe stories" about President Clinton was compiled by a young White House aide toiling in an obscure corner of the Old Executive Office Building. But there is little doubt it reflected views held strongly in the Oval Office.

The conclusion has long been a favorite of Clinton loyalists: that a cabal of right-wing extremists had figured out how "fantasy can become fact" by advancing rumors about Whitewater and Clinton's personal life through a "media food chain" that starts in ideological journals and ultimately finds its way onto the front pages of mainstream U.S. newspapers. What is striking about the document is that it lays down this suspicion-laden theory about how the media works in cold print, under the imprimatur of the White House.
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In the theory set forth in the memo, unverified stories originate with "well funded right wing think tanks" like the Western Journalism Center or American Spectator magazine. Posted on the Internet, they are then picked up in London tabloids or by conservative U.S. papers like the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal. Congress orders inquiries and suddenly the rest of the mainstream media begin covering it as a legitimate story.

Our President/Their Scandal: The Role of the British Press in Keeping the Clinton Scandals Alive

Introduction
The spring of 1994 was an interesting time for news in Washington. The Clinton administration’s flagship domestic policy, health care industry reform, was being debated; intervening in Haiti to restore the democratically elected government was being openly discussed; nuclear diplomacy was being carried on with varying degrees of urgency in relation to North Korea, India and Pakistan; the first free elections in South Africa’s history were coming up. Hanging over all events was the ongoing war in Bosnia.
If you lived in America and read the newspaper you could read about all these things. You would come away from reading the day’s news with a general sense that the Clinton team was still trying to find its feet. You would certainly not come away thinking the Administration was in crisis. If you lived in London you would have had quite a different impression. The President most of the American press was covering, and the President the British press was covering were entirely different. The British press corps in Washington seemed wholly focussed on the sexual harassment lawsuit against the President being made by Paula Jones. They gleefully reported every sordid allegation coming out of Arkansas. In some quarters of the British press Vince Foster’s corpse was exhumed to be anecdotally examined for proof that he had been murdered.
I live in London. That spring I was working as National Public Radio’s London correspondent. Part of my job was to read the British press and the American press every day. It seemed to me the British papers had gone mad. That the tabloids would want to play up sex scandals involving the President was understandable. Scandal is an essential part of their editorial mix. But the quality press: The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and the Independent all took an astonishing interest in scandal stories – at the expense of other news.
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Bill Clinton's White House imagined a "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" in 1995, and in 2016 that "media food chain" gobbled up CNN and Buzzfeed.

-PJ

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