The final post

It is with this entry that knohme duh ploom ends its semester reign over the world of the internet. There have been good times and bad, bad postings and even worse postings, and even a "comment" left by an internet porn proprietor who "read" a posting and "invited" the writer to "check out her site."

Indeed, it is through this cutting edge medium that the exploration of the relationship between the government of the United States and the mass media was examined closely. The postings here are certainly not exhaustive and absolute, but rather a hands-on partaking of this relationship.

Alas, the final post will deal with a popular topic over the course of this blog: President Bush. (Clearly writers like Dan Hallin and Lance Bennett point to the focusing on official sources--none more official than the president--as an inherent problem within the media, but too bad. We're not breaking any stories on this site, we're trying to understand stories broken elsewhere.)

And what a story we got from Sunday's NY Times to go out with--it deals with the government, defining before seeing, public opinion, and the mass media. Yeehaw.

Click here to be wowed.

http://nytimes.com/2005/12/04/politics/04strategy.html?hp&ex=1133758800&en=eded032aae63bdcc&ei=5094&partner=homepage


So we have a governmental figure using the mass media, in this case a televised "pseudo-event", to influence the public's opinion.

We must first define Lippmann's view on the news to discuss how Bush used it as an institution to frame his message.

"The press...has come to be regarded as an organ of direct democracy...The Court of Public Opinion , open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time. ... the quality of the news about modern societyis an index of its social organization. The better the institutions, the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced, the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news. At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions..." (229, my emphasis).

So simply by carrying Bush's speech, which comes in the midst of a public movement away from supporting the war in Iraq, news organizations and networks made a conscious decision to make his speech "news". But as explored in the New York Times article, no real new substance was broached, no specifics about stopping the insurgency and ensuring American troops' safety were given.

Rather, the speech was clearly written to influence Public Opinion; not to necessarily outline plans to win the war but the make sure the American people would support it long enough that it could be won.

"He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war."

So, a political scientist who was by all accounts weaned on Lippmann wrote Bush's speech knowing he could manipulate the big PO by repeated imagery.

"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Because President Bush knows anytime for the rest of his life he can call a "press conference" without answering questions and have it be reprinted and broadcast in full, and because he was able to freely give his message--which was crafted by someone who understands the relationship we've been studying all semester--he was able to reach the American people uninterrupted with the clear goal of changing their minds on the war.

It's not necessarily that he's a dirty politician, but rather a smart one, relying on a seemingly last ditch effort to join em if you can't beat em in order to get one final charge in on Public Opinion.

But if you care about the lives of strangers and wish the US would stop making enemies sooner rather than later, "one of us" joining up with a politcian has to be borderline scary.

Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

Think about that.


I'll see you along the way. Good night and good luck. Stay Classy, America. Good night Chet, good night David. Courage. And that's the way it is.