Publicity's the key

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Thursday March 23, 2006 13:23 by Ted Bagg cryptodemocrat at yahoo dot com

Framing vs Money: Don't blame the public.

In the US, a currently faddish idea among some center-left political thinkers is that the Right Wingers have developed a lead in rhetorical technique, that they are better than the left at “framing” issues, at implanting truisms in the public mind to which they can refer with advantage in policy debates.

The truth is much blunter and simpler: The Right has a lot more money, and almost all of the US media parrots their party line. Much of the public lacks the education and the free time to see through the lies they hear repeated in the news every day, and so is misled.

If progressive viewpoints were presented in even 20% of the media instead of less than 5%, the the rich man's feeble lies would dissolve in the public mind like grease meeting soap.

That 60% in the US (70% of troops in the war zones) oppose the war under these conditions of heavy propaganda is a credit to the public. The reason that public demonstrations are often poorly attended in the US (we did have many tens of thousands on the streets nationally over the weekend) is surely due to the fact that the public is mostly uninformed about them. I suspect the same is true in Ireland.

Remember also that the Right had to steal the last Presidential election; they'd have lost otherwise. Most of the US public, in other words, has opposed them for years, and merely waits advice in converting its opposition from passive to active.