As we have stated here before, Republicans have spent decades building a media machine reaching into nearly every corner of American life. Fox “News” is only the start. Sinclair Broadcast Group owns local television stations that reach nearly four in ten American households with its conservative-biased programming. Add Newsmax, OAN, the Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network, AM talk radio, newspapers such as the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post (both controlled by News Corp. i.e. the family of Rupert Murdoch), and even CBS News now in right wing hands, and you get Uber drivers reciting right wing talking points to captive customers. Many non-conservatives therefore get exposed to this Republican ecosphere as well, as the massive reach of GOP talking points means they become the actual discussion topics for many issues.
Democrats have no comparable media structure. As a result, conservative outlets can seize upon a topic and hammer it far longer than any Democratic effort could sustain. The tactic often follows a simple pattern: Republicans take an isolated incident, strip it of context, and use their media machine to present it as proof of a nationwide crisis, often using their invented false narratives such as “Scary Brown People”.
In the wake of numerous polls showing that American voters hate the Republicans’ plan to kill Medicare as we know it and replace it with a private voucher system, Republicans are doing the only sensible thing. No, they’re not backing off their Medicare-killing policy contained in GOP Rep. Paul Ryan‘s budget plan, they’re trying to change their messaging about it. In particular, Republican Party guru Karl Roverecently suggested that “Congressional Republicans—especially in the House—need a political war college that schools incumbents and challengers in the best way to explain, defend and attack on the issue of Medicare reform.”
You have to hand it to the Republicans — when they see their message failing, they often stick to their policy and simply make efforts to rewrite the message. Moreover, as Rove’s Wall Street Journal op-ed indicates, Republicans often treat political messaging as a “war”. It is, and at least the Republicans put up a fight rather than quickly caving.
Of course, there is a limit to the amount of lipstick that can be put on a pig, and it’s quite possible that no amount of ingenious messaging will save the Republicans from their highly unpopular Medicare-killing plan. Nevertheless, the Republicans are going to try, and a messaging “war college” sounds like a good idea. Once again, Democrats can take some tactical political messaging lessons from the Republicans.
By now, most of us are familiar with Anthony Weiner‘s personal behavioral lapses in his Twitter sex scandal. However, Weiner’s public messaging failures in this case were also epic. Weiner adopted a strange strategy of denying part of the story, i.e., that he had sent photos of his underwear-clad crotch to a woman via Twitter, but then saying that he could not state “with certitude” whether the picture in question was of him. This vague answer struck many reporters as suspicious, and they continued their media feeding frenzy that, within a few days, led to Weiner’s press conference where he did an about-face and admitted that the picture in question was of him, that he sent the photo, and that he had sent similar photos and/or had similar online exchanges with approximately six other women. Now Weiner’s political career hangs by a thread.
So what could, and should, Weiner have done differently, messaging-wise, once the initial stories about him were publicized?
