The story starts off full of promise, with a surprisingly frank desciption of what's happening with John McCain on YouTube:
The video lasts just more than three minutes. But that's long enough to raise some nasty doubts about John McCain's reputation as a straight talker.
There's the Arizona senator arguing both sides of President Bush's tax cuts. Here's the supposed foreign policy wizard flubbing the simple facts about which terrorists are being trained in Iran. He's even ducking his own admission that he needs to learn more about economics.
The newsreel of McCain lowlights has zoomed up the YouTube charts in the last week, with more than 1.5 million views. "John McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare" is the video's title, which might be dismissed as partisan hype but for one thing: It's true.
The presumed Republican presidential nominee is taking a serious drubbing on YouTube, the most popular video-sharing service on the Internet and the virtual town square for millions of new young voters.
Search "John McCain" on YouTube and you'll find the latest broadside, by Brave New Films of Culver City, and a lot more that's not good for a candidate who's built his reputation on constancy and authenticity.
There's McCain stumbling over a debate question and, worse, his cringe-worthy answer wickedly paired with the hapless Miss Teen USA contestant who went blank on a query about Americans and geography.
There's McCain seemingly on the verge of swallowing his tongue, so great is his discomfort when Ellen DeGeneres asks him why women like her shouldn't be allowed to marry other women.
Six of the top 10 videos returned by a "John McCain" YouTube search Thursday pegged the 71-year-old as inconsistent, extreme, wooden or a combination of the three. (The one clearly favorable piece came from the McCain campaign and focused on his Navy service.)
The article then draws a sharp contrast with the high-volume pro-Obama videos, then turns to a more comparative mode. There is nothing wrong with this sort of approach, other than the utter lameness it produces:
With about five months to go before the general election, Obama will face his own uncomfortable video moments. Elsewhere in the fractured media universe, say AM talk radio, he'll feel the heat.
But that doesn't mean Republicans aren't worried about the YouTube imbalance.
"This is another example of the generation gap that the Republicans are facing. And that gap is morphing into a chasm," said Frank Luntz, a veteran GOP pollster. Yes, many of the young video viewers are already committed to Obama, but watching and even making the short films has turned the merely amused into the deeply committed.
"You activate them and engage them in a way you haven't before, up to and including on election day," Luntz said. "I think this is a critical part of Obama's appeal."
What's just happened here? First, an incredibly significant phenomena-the role of YouTube in promoting a counter-narrative to McCain's Free Ride in the M$M-has been implicitly reduced to mere "uncomfortable video moments", and we're assured, without explanation, that Obama will have some of these, too, before the race is done. Second, AM talk radio is introduced as on a par with YouTube-even though rightwing talk radio is overwhelmingly just a sewer of smears, accusations, gossip, rumors and innuendo. Truth, lies, it's all the same. Third, we get a special guest appearance from rightwing guru Frank Luntz. The M$M just loves Frank Luntz, in some ways even more than it loves John McCain. So of course there's a quote from Frank Luntz. Stating the obvious, but obscuring the deeper reasons why. Which, of course, is the point of this entire piece, in a nutshell.
The article then talks a bit about Brave New Films' aggressive promotion efforts-a nice little bone thrown out to the left-before invoking the M$Ms tired old favorite, the "balance" meme:
Online film has lowered the price of entry to political discourse and pumped new life into an ossified communications universe.
That doesn't mean it's brought greater accuracy or fairness.
So videos will continue to portray Obama as a fellow traveler of Louis Farrakhan, even though the candidate has denounced the firebrand minister. And McCain will be accused a thousand times over of pining for a 100-year war in Iraq, when he actually said he could see keeping military bases for that long, but only in a stabilized country.
Of course, there's no comparison between these two. It was McCain who voluntarily talked about staying in Iraq for 100 years as a way of avoiding a discussion of how he would end hostilities, and he never even bothered to say-until much, much later-how long he thought it would be until hostilities subsided. In fact, we still have no clear idea how-or why-McCain can conceived of leaving US troops in Iraq for a century under any conditions, much less how he imagines they might ever be free from enemy attacks. It's a totally nonsensical statement on his behalf that's completely typical of the enormous gap between his un-earned reputation for foreign policy expertise and the reality of his belligerent cluelessness.
In sharp contrast, Obama has done nothing remotely similar to invite specious charges connecting him to Louis Farrakhan. But all that matters to the institutionally sloppy Times--as with almost all the rest of the national news media-is that they get in their "balance," because that is narrative requirement number one, far above and beyond anything to do with truth or accuracy.
As is generally typical of the "balance" meme, you have to actually know something about the subjects being presented to balance in order to realize how utter deceptive it is. It's much easier to state the meme than to debunk it. And that's precisely how successful memes propagate. It's not their truth that they depend on to spread, it's simply their spreadability itself. And that spreadability draws both on simplicity, and on the environment that makes it inherently appealing for some purpose.
The "balance" meme here serves to reinforce the very collusion of the M$M and McCain's candidacy that the YouTube videos attacking McCain serve to undermine. It's a way of superficially dismissing criticisms of McCain without ever really examining them with the sort of care and attention that the media is supposed to engage in to earn its paycheck. The "balance" meme allows the right wing to trump up any sort of charge against the "left" to "balance" out its core organizing principle of demonizing others (see Glenn Greenwald's Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics). And it allows the media to appear "fair and balanced" without actually having to do any real work. Everybody wins!
With the analytical heavy lifting now out of the way (yes, that's what it was!), it's time to coast home by way of a few well-chosen anecdotes to distract and amuse. And so the article now turns to the question of how McCain could play catch-up, and uses Mike Huckabee as an example:
The former Arkansas governor reached into his (admittedly shallow) pool of Hollywood supporters and fished out . . . Chuck Norris. The tough guy and the wisecracking pol teamed in an irony-drenched ad. (Huckabee staring earnestly from the screen: "My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris.") That one spot was a bigger hit (2 million views) than anything McCain has produced.
Of course, it's idiotic. But one might well praise Huckabee precisely because he's so out front with the sheer idiocy of his approach. One cannot, however, praise the Times for so thoroughly obscuring the fact that the GOP has nothing.
As it meanders on to it's inevitable collapse, the article then drifts into terminal cutesiness:
For similar results, it may be time for McCain to play his own, less-menacing Hollywood ace: Wilford Brimley.
Yes, it's been years since the portly, walrus-mustachioed actor appeared in "Cocoon." But he's got those Quaker Oats ads and that stolid, old-man cool. And, yes, Brimley supports John McCain.
A few years ago, someone took a TV spot of Brimley hawking a diabetes test kit, set it to a dance groove and dredged up 736,000 viewers.
Now he's got a presidential candidate to sell. How hard can this stuff be?
It's a truly remarkable collapse into triviality for an article that started off remarkably hard-hitting. But, then, it always was a media story, after all. It was only using seriousness as a hook, because for some unknown reason people are just eating up that sort of stuff nowadays.
Go figure! |
