Posted on 06/23/2015 5:31:41 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Republicans Must Stop Letting the Media Manipulate Them, Daniel Greenfield
Groucho Marx used to ask contestants, Have you stopped beating your wife?
A number of Republican candidates showed that they still hadnt mastered that one when the media came asking them about the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
Like so many chumps undone by Groucho, they thought that they were showing off how noble they were, when all they did was answer, Yes, I did stop beating my wife. And I mostly oppose it now.
Instead of looking like heroes, they looked like guilty men confessing to a crime.
Like most questions the media asks Republicans, it was a loaded question meant to set up a narrative. The question feeds into the narrative. The answer itself doesnt really matter.
The difference between condemning the Confederate flag and supporting it is the difference between, No, I havent stopped beating my wife and Yes, I have stopped beating my wife.
Either way its a story about the Republican position on beating women and the Confederacy.
The media does this all the time. It manufactures a story. Then it reports on the story that it made up. Then it keeps the story alive by interviewing people about its own narrative.
The media appears to have avoided asking Hillary Clinton about the flag despite her husband signing a bill into law that stated the Arkansas state flag commemorates the Confederacy and sending letters of congratulations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. When she does make the inevitable statement, it will be spun as a rebuke to Republicans and there will be no questions about Arkansas.
The Republican candidates were being asked about the flag in order to connect their party to the Charleston church massacre by way of the flag. The whole premise of the question was guilt by association. There was no practical reason to ask Scott Walker, running for president from the notorious Southern outpost of Wisconsin, about a flag flying in South Carolina.
What they were really being asked is, Have you racist Republicans ended your support for killing black people.
Too many Republican replies came down to some version of, Yes, we have.
Once the media had its answers, it was able to do three things.
It didnt matter that most of the Republicans in the stories were condemning the flag. The association alone created a linkage between Republicans, the flag and the massacre. Like the wife beating query, the question creates its own aura of association and guilt.
This is one of the medias favorite tricks. It seeks out a Republican with an outlier opinion; it asks other Republicans about the issue and reports on the debate within the Republican Party. The media kept the War on Women going with that particular trick. Romney and Jeb Bush were stupid and egotistical enough to help the media pull the same trick with the Confederate flag.
This is the best part of the whole ghoulish circus because it allows the media to write long background pieces like The GOPs long history with the Confederate flag while accusing Republicans of really being hypocrites for only claiming to oppose the flag while continuing their racist opposition to Obama.
Were now at stage 3.
All it took to get to stage 3 were Republicans willing to comment on an issue that they shouldnt have commented on. The media would have gone to stage 3 anyway, but without comments from Republican presidential candidates, the stories would have been buried at Salon and Slate, instead of getting top billing in the mainstream media. By responding, the Republican candidates gave the story legs.
There were two correct responses to the question.
Scott Walker said that the shootings shouldnt be politicized until the victims were buried and the families have a chance to mourn. It was a sensible response that left the media gritting its teeth.
We should honor the dead and the families by allowing them to bury their loved ones. And then you could perfectly ask me that question at some point in the next week or two when thats done, he said.
Of course by then the medias window of opportunity will have passed and everyone knows that. The media accused Scott Walker of dodging the question, but it was a feeble attack.
The other response is to challenge the premise and turn the question around on the asker. The Republican Party had defeated slavery while the Democrats had championed it. Democratic mobs of immigrants stirred up by community organizers had raged across the same northern cities where its media elites now smugly rule, burning black orphanages and murdering Republican supporters.
The Democratic Partys two previous presidents, Carter and Clinton, were both tainted by racist associations. South Carolina had, until not all that long ago, been a Democratic stronghold.
Not enough Republicans are willing to expose the medias agenda by challenging its premises. Instead most tried to position themselves on the right side of the issue while describing it, correctly, as a decision for the state. It was a matter of childs play for the media to tear them apart as hypocrites.
This isnt about the Confederate flag. Its about Republicans who still dont seem to have caught on to the medias tricks or figured out how to counter them. Its also about liberal Republicans who are eager to help the media do its dirty work and dont realize that their media pals see them as the enemy.
Too many Republicans have been taught by their strategists and consultants to see the media as people who can help them tell their story, but the media is only here to tell its story in which they are the villains. In the past, even a biased media might have contended itself with sabotaging their stories, but these days the media develops its own fully formed stories and works to fit Republicans into them.
The media is the most dangerous opponent of any Republican running for political office. It has more money, more people and more talent than any conventional political opponent. It also commands more airtime, column inches and pageviews. It has the same mission as any political opponent, but with few of the same limitations.
What the media does best is tell stories. That is also what the best political candidates do. An election is a contest of stories. The best story is the one that people find the most compelling.
Any Republican who wants to win the White House will have to beat the media. He will have to tell his story without letting the media fit him into its story. The media will tell the same story that it tells every time. It will invent gaffes, accusations of racism and invest him with an air of malice and incompetence.
He will not only have to tell a better story, but avoid letting himself get trapped in the medias tale. To do that he will have to understand the story that the media is trying to tell and how it intends to fit him into it. Like a battle, he must know the enemys strategy in order to ambush it or avoid it. What he cant afford to do is to assume that he can charm the media or impress it with his good intentions.
The media is not here to help him. It is here to hurt him. In its story, he loses. His party loses. Conservatives lose forever. The mobs of progress move forward and make over the world their way.
A Republican who cant handle the flag question will spend the election being stitched up as racist, sexist and the worst monster since John McCain and Mitt Romney. A Republican who lets the media fit him into its narrative cant win. The election will not belong to Republicans who let the media tell their stories. It will belong to those that challenge the medias stories with more compelling stories.
“and the Democratic vote for President in 1932 and 1936 in SC was over 98%. “
Jim Crow, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc., were all devices intended by Democrats to prevent blacks from voting for Republicans!
And the first result of the analysis should be that every "question" they ask isn't so much a question as a setup for "Gotcha!". Our candidates need to be smart enough not to step into the trap. We lost two sure Senate seats when Mourdock and Aiken walked into the ambush with the abortion question set-up. Take a lesson from Cruz who was smart enough to throw it right back into the 'Rat reporter's ugly face.
You’re right on this... our guys don’t understand members of the press hate them.
Mona Charen, I think, had a good piece recently that should be read and cross referenced here.
She disputed that the old Southern segregationist Democrats had become Republicans. With the exception of Strom Thurmond, she argued, they’d been supplanted politically by non-segregationist Republicans and died off.
So we’re really caught playing ball on the Democrats field here. We need to move to making the Democrats play ball on OUR field. Which is easier said than done, but rejecting to their faces the underlying premise of their political attacks is a good place to start.
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