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28 Feb 07
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If such grassroots media are restoring balance to the marketplace of information, it may be not a moment too soon, because images and the meanings they evoke have become so dominant as to seed the culture with vast distortions, Rich charges. “It’s a cultural pattern now: empirical reality doesn’t penetrate as well as it should,” he says. “I have to hope that given the price we’ve paid in Iraq, as a society we’re going to learn something from this. With the world a more dangerous place than ever, and after the wreckage of the Bush years, America has got to get its act together and address these problems. If we can’t agree on what the facts are, then we have no hope. We need to distinguish between facts and showmanship, facts and propaganda. If you can’t agree on the fact that the house is burning down, you can’t put out the fire.”
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In addition, the alternative world of “guerrilla media”—like blogs and the on-line video available at YouTube—“have the effect of loosening the establishment’s grip on the control and shaping of information,” Rich says, citing the example of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney: YouTube has been flooded with viewers seeking the video of his debate with Senator Edward M. Kennedy during a 1994 senatorial campaign in Massachusetts, in which Romney expressed views diametrically opposed to his current positions. “Spin can now be deflected very, very quickly,” says Rich, “not by counter-spin, but by documentary evidence that can be disseminated so quickly and vividly in the new digital world.”
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The rush for the brush and the motorcycles grows from an increasing awareness of how powerful visual images have become in forming perceptions. Yet images can cut both ways. “Politicians are going nuts about it,” says Rich. “They are very chastened now by what happened to [former Virginia] Senator George Allen, who was caught on video insulting a young man by calling him ‘macaca’ or [former Montana] Senator Conrad Burns, caught dozing off during a hearing. Any video can be slapped up there and come back to haunt them. The Bush White House, which was so masterful at controlling imagery, using the Statue of Liberty and the aircraft carrier as a backdrop for Bush, has really lost its mojo. One example is the hanging of Saddam Hussein—that video has done the Iraqi government, and the Bush White House, enormous damage. Another is Bush’s speech announcing the troop surge in Iraq: he looked scared, very anxious, and was in the strange setting of the White House library instead of the Oval Office. Bush did not look in command.
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Today, any aspiring politician must successfully exploit the icon-generating machinery of mass culture, less to articulate specific positions on issues than to project image and character. “Right before George W. Bush runs for president, he buys a ranch—one that isn’t really a ranch—to establish the image that he is a red-state shit-kicker rather than the scion of one of the most aristocratic families in the United States, a graduate of Andover, Yale, and Harvard. In the 2004 campaign, you have another Yale aristocrat, John Kerry, driving a Harley Davidson onto the set of the Jay Leno show. That’s just like Bush clearing brush on his ranch. All of us need to question this level of cultural manipulation.”
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“Al Gore…may be the first public figure in history who has gone overnight from having the personality of a tree to that of a chainsaw mowing down anything in its path.”
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Though his own political leanings are generally liberal, Rich is equally eager to expose hypocrisy, dissimulation, and phony images emanating from the political left; he’s a muckraker at heart. “If there was a day that Kerry lost the election, it may have come in August [2004], when he took reporters’ questions while posing against the macho landscape of the Grand Canyon,” writes Rich in The Greatest Story Ever Sold. “Asked if he still would have voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein if he knew then that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Kerry answered yes. Would Kerry have also answered that a Senator should have voted to authorize the Vietnam War even if he knew that the Johnson administration had hyped North Vietnamese attacks on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin? Hardly. His answer about Iraq was a moment of supreme intellectual dishonesty that sullied his own Vietnam past as surely as the sleazy Swift Boat character assassins had.”
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Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete.
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