Monday, September 24, 2007

MoveOn & Media Double Standards

By Robert Parry
September 24, 2007

MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad may have gotten more attention than it deserved, but it also has underscored several important points: the foolishness of MoveOn’s ad-buying strategy, the cringing hypocrisy of the mainstream U.S. news media when attacked by the Right, and the pressing need to build independent news outlets.

Ironically, MoveOn has long resisted using its fund-raising capability on the Internet to support an independent news infrastructure, favoring instead the idea of making expensive ad buys in the New York Times and other Big Media outlets.

Read on.
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3 comments:

SirScud said...

Robert,
Your point is well taken that the sophomoric language of the MoveOn ad has played to the advantage of the Bush Junta and it's MSM synchophants, of which the NYT is a one of the major players. While this organization justly deserves recognition for it's ability to reach over 3 million members and raise large amounts of money, it seems to lack the 'media savvy' to effectively reach a wider audience. This, of course, is a problem that seems to plague all progressive groups in that they seem to be unable to organize any continuity between their respective causes and political efforts. The organization of an independent entity is just one cause that suffers from this weakness in the progressive community, albeit a very important one.

Mon Sep 24, 04:13:00 PM 2007
Michael Collins said...

Have these people even heard the term "polemic?" I'm amazed at how weak they are.

Here's something simple, my commentary on Congress since day one of the war through the present.
Ten Things Congress Did Instead of Getting Us the Hell Out of Iraq

Tue Sep 25, 12:59:00 AM 2007
Brother Billy said...

I think the problem isn't "sophomoric language" per se. If we had sufficient media power, the inevitable counterattacks could have been used to develop and spread the message. Our definition of betrayal could then have been reinforced.

Thus, we need to focus on the media problem, not the language problem. Almost any strong adversarial campaign will contain elements that can be portrayed by its opponents as "personal" or "outrageous" or beyond the limits of civil discourse. Without the media power to use those counterattacks to our advantage, and without any echo effect coming from the Democrats in Congress, we lose.

Given the imbalance in media power, it behooves us to be careful and excruciatingly precise in our language. That doesn't mean we pull our punches. We just have to be both clever and wise.

Tue Sep 25, 01:15:00 AM 2007

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