Disinformation from GOP, Inc.

More on the Republican platform.

In the face of the unpopularity of the Republican platform, the disinformation was easy. First, they worked the refs assiduously for a long time. If the media continued to report facts and call bullshit on the bullshitters, there was no hope.

But advertising provided the perfect model of field-tested deceit that was credible to mass audiences. It had worked beautifully with cigarettes for years. Clearly, for a manageable price - since corporations used it every day - it could convince Americans to believe many things that were not true.

Advertising was also a way to exert power over the media. After all, corporations were already paying news outlets for the eyeballs of their readers. Why weren't the newspapers, radio stations, and TV networks grateful to the very people who were paying the bills? Instead, the journalists would actually bite the hand that fed them. That had to stop. But how?

The answer was to appeal to the vanity, laziness, and greed of the reporters and editors. If flattery, convenience, and sales worked with products on essentially all Americans, why wouldn't it work on underpaid hacks?

Appealing to laziness was the easiest. Corporations had been writing press releases forever, but that hadn't done the trick.

Small papers might edit PR's pearls lightly and print them verbatim - the desired result - but hoity-toity outfits like the New York Times would still make Mobil actually pay for its advertorials on the op-ed page. Their flacks just didn't have enough letters following their names, or failing that, at least some impressive title. Manager of public relations just couldn't hold a candle to senior fellow.

What the conservatives needed to thrust their propaganda was to dress it up as serious intellect, an alternate academy. In the 1970s, they increased funding of the American Enterprise Institute by a factor of eight. In 1973, they started the Heritage Foundation. In 1979, they started the Claremont Institute and the Pacific Research Institute. In 1982, they started the Manhattan Institute (motto: "Turning intellect into influence"). John Stossel is a trustee, but he never thrusts the propaganda, right? More important, they turned their sights to the nefariously independent judiciary by starting the Federalist Society, expropriating the good name of historic liberals for their reactionary cause.

From all these hifalutin' drunk tanks, uh, think tanks, the conservatives generated a huge volume of thinly sourced "research" that was very useful when planting stories in the willfully naive press. Like their creationist friends, they started with their ideologically correct conclusions and searched for fig leaf rationales to fortify them, not even bothering to justify them. It's enough to fog the subject with doubt so that people can believe what their prejudices tell them.

Besides, a white paper is sooo much more appealing than a press release.

Since the conservatives have ready access to piles of cash (Olin, Hertz, Scaife, to name a few), they found several ways to reward helpful journalists, so that they could buy houses on Martha's Vineyard despite toiling in a thoroughly middle class profession. First, of course, was the creation of parallel, ideological media such as Fox News and the Washington Times. This provided good conduits for cash to right-thinking (and I do mean right) journalists. Just look how often Anne Kornblut shows up on Fox in a red suit. Then, there's the rubber chicken circuit, which pays thousands to business-friendly reporters. Hello, Cokie and Stephen Roberts. Then of course, there are also the appearance fees for laughing along with Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and hundreds of other wingnut gasbags on talk radio.

The conservatives are businessmen, of course, so they want value for their money. Accordingly, they exploited their foundations to start the gravy train rolling for young conservatives who otherwise would wind up drinking three-martini lunches near Wall St. Ramesh Ponnuru Dinesh D'Souza, for example, couldn't reason his way out of Hanover, but he has spent the last twenty years suckling at the teat of rightwing private foundations. Whew, at least he's not taking public money for his sinecures. (Corrected, with apologies to Ponnuru and thanks to Ben in comments.)

Ironically, the wingers have proven willing to buy and pulp hundreds of thousands of unreadable books in order to subsidize their greatest thinkers and writers. Maybe it's not so ironic. Their core constituencies are not great readers of anything other than the Wall Street Journal or the King James Bible. It is ironic that a subsidy method pioneered by Jim Wright would be acquired and used by Newt Gingrich, the very man who used its scandal to bring down Wright's Speakership, especially given its existing popularity in the Conservative Book Club and Regnery Press.

I suspect that conservatives also provide direct payments to favored journalists, but I don't have any evidence for this. If it's true, it's also easy to hide.

With all this money and ease floating around, maybe flattery is not really necessary. And, clearly, conservatives have not flattered journalists as a group. What they have done instead is to coopt journalists into the ruling class in Washington. The price has been low - a few shrimp here, a few canapes there. Invitations to the cool parties, once punished by their peer group, become the currency of influence. That's why Tim Russert is "tough" in the useless way of always reinforcing the conventional narrative.

Then, there were the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the erosion of ownership limits. What a bonus! The moneyed interests could now employ economies of scale to commoditize conservative messages, as they own more and more of the media.

The GOP board of directors probably didn't have the vision to set the steps from the beginning and then execute a fixed plan. That probably would not have worked in any case. Flexibility is essential in any campaign, and they read situations and media well and improvised well.

Update: Someone has been ego-surfing. No harm in that. How'd you think I found the link, anyway? I knew there had to be a reason this post got comments! The NRO denizens were probably starving for some place to comment.

Update (2/12/2012):  I had left out the word not in the sentence about the King James bible and the Wall Street Journal.