• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

White House compounds PR gaffes

Do I think this should be a scandal? Not as such, you're right, pre-planning this sort of thing is rather sensible. Is it obvious that this was planned such as to help Bush's approval ratings? Yes. Was this obvious before we saw them prepping the soldiers? Yes.

I mean come on. The blog guy obviously loves his job. What kind of freak loves their job this much? :)

I don't think there's anything too untruthful about hiring the upbeat combat medic instead of some angsty soldier who wishes he'd read the fine print in his Army contract. It's to be expected that this sort of thing will be a love fest for the president and the overall mission rather than being some sort of deep discussion of issues concerning Iraq. Yeah, it's quite lame, but hey, that's politics.
 
It's not a scandal so much as an insult. It's an attempt to play us. And that simply is not right, and Bush and Rove know it.
 
Roadtoad said:
It's not a scandal so much as an insult. It's an attempt to play us. And that simply is not right, and Bush and Rove know it.
Click to expand...

Sure, they know it. Sadly, diehard Republicans don't...and wouldn't care if they did.
 
Cylinder said:
So what is your objection? Can you cite any other example of instances where a person unfamiliar with the media is asked question on national television without the same kind of prep? Even those who do this for a living are prepped for television appearances.
Click to expand...
I've been on a national TV politics show, live. We were asked to arrive some little time before the show. We were seated in the audience area. Some people who had insisted on being present after having caused trouble in previous programmes were allowed to be there but warned that they would not be given any opportunity to speak. Some (including me) were ushered to individually named seats. The rest were seated in blocks according to the political group they came from. So the presenter had an idea what sort of opinion was where in the house, and had a block of seats he knew should be ignored. That was all. Oh, and we were warned not to say anything slanderous, because we'd be held personally liable and hung out to dry.

Then we had a dry run-through. The "real" topic was about devolution in the UK, but the topic of the run-through was the ban on hunting with hounds. We were encouraged to have the discussion and ask questions in the format which would be used by the show. However, the points which would arise in the real discussion weren't even touched on. And this was all condicted by a small group of stooges, the real presenter (Jonathan Dimbleby) wasn't there.

The real discussion was absolutely live, and completely unrehearsed and unscripted. The only preparation I could see was to pick audience members who were likely to say things more interesting than to complain about ration packs. They do this every week, you know. And that one is only one programme among many. Yes, sometimes politicians are embarrassed by what is said. They usually live.

(Funny thing. I remember the mock hunting debate better than the real thing. I'm interested in the hunting thing too, and when the presenter - possibly deliberately - made a very bad point, I stuck my hand up and tore him to shreds, authoritatively and succinctly. The real debate was boring, probably because Alex Salmond who had been scheduled to be on the panel had called off, and there was no Scottish content. If I'd known that in advance I probably wouldn't have gone. Anyway, I sat there silent for most of the discussion. I noticed quite a few people waving their hands and jumping around to get to speak, but being ignored by the Chair. Then one of the English prats on the panel said something really very provoking, and I decided to speak. My hand hardly got to shoulder level before Dimbleby peremptorily silenced the person who was talking and brought me in. I was quite impressed. I was in a personally named seat, and I think I'd also been pegged as a good bet because of my intervention in the mock event, and Dimbleby was obviously waiting for me to make a sign that I had something to say. He was keen to hear it. But apart from knowing my political affiliation, he had NO CLUE what I might have come out with live on air.)

Rolfe.
 
Cylinder said:
I'm paying pretty close attention. Thanks for your concern, though. You made a very specific assertion that the conversation was scripted:




Where do I find that evidence?
Click to expand...

The fact that the conversation was rehearsed tells me it was scripted.
 
Originally Posted by davefoc :
But is there an ethical line for PR stunts and did the administration cross it here? I think so. Representing this as a conversation between soldiers and the president when the job of one of the soldiers interviewed is a propagandist, and a propagandist with ties to the Republican party no less is a lie and IMHO unethical.


Cylinder Responded:
So are you arguing that security has improved in Iraq to the extent that a soldier stationed in Tikrit does not have the amount of front-line experience needed to comment on operations in the real war?

Are you suggesting that a person does not have an ethical right to comment on a situation to which they are a principal by virtue of party membership?
Click to expand...
You seemed to have misinterpretted my point. The distinction I was making is between soldiers whose principle job is the creation and dissemination of propaganda and all other soldiers. As I had previously stated, I don't think this kind of publicity stunt is a good idea. By its very nature the stunt requires some misrepresentation. But when professional propagandists are included in the group without being revealed in a clear cut manner the stunt has now passed out of the range of a little casual misrepresentation to an outright fraud. It now appears that there actually were two people included with the soldiers whose principle function is to create propaganda.

Originally Posted by davefoc :
But even if you don't agree that it was unethical it was at least a sign of incompetence when the truth about the stunt became public.


Cylinder Responded:
Since I understand the fact that the president isn't primarily a media producer, I don't think that argument has any merit whatsoever.

Many of the comments in this thread anger me greatly, because the premise is that a reporter holed up in some hotel in Baghdad trumps some of the soldiers serving on the ground. That's not an acceptable situation.
Click to expand...
Here I don't understand your point at all. The president has people whose job is to figure out how to most successfuly promote the president and his message through the use of media. The president doesn't just randomly bounce from media event to media event. His staff selects and orchestrates to a degree those media events which it believes will serve the president's goals. In this case they selected a hokey media event that might have had some upside but also involved some potentially unethical actions. They chose to go forward and what many viewed as unethical behavior became widely publicized. You may not believe it was unethical, OK we disagree there, but how you can look at the results and not see some incompetence is beyond me. The net result of this stunt was general disgust expressed by almost every main stream media outlet, the creation of fodder for hundreds of blogs to take shots at the president and the use of the stunt as source material for jokes wth the Bush administration as the target.

Do you see this stunt as a sign of skill on the part of the Bush administration's PR team? What would you consider a failure by the Bush PR team?
 
Cylinder wrote:
Are you suggesting that a person does not have an ethical right to comment on a situation to which they are a principal by virtue of party membership?
Click to expand...

I meant to respond to this comment in the post above. At the time I wrote the above I was under the impression that Lombardo had worked on Republican campaigns. I couldn't find a link to that effect when I went looking for one for this post. If she hasn't I am sorry that I might have implied something that was incorrect. I didn't mean to imply that it was inappropriate to select a registered Republican or someone tending to vote Republican to be one of the soldiers that made up the group. I do think that if a person works on Republican campaigns or has been a employee of the Republican party or has run for office as a Republican that this kind of connection should be revealed.
 
Yah, I know it's for one thing. But it applies here, too.

lnq051023.gif
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom