Liberal Media Tactics; Neumayr
George Neumayr at the American Spectator has a good column on the politics of the Schiavo case.
To embarrass the Republicans and ensure that everyone would feel good about killing Schiavo, the media dug down into their bag of malicious tricks, using tendentious polling, a smear job against Tom DeLay, reports of faux-concern about conservative division (worrying about a cohesive Republican Party is of course foremost in their minds), and flat-out Orwellian propaganda to confuse the matter as much as possible.
The reliance on euphemism was almost nonstop. Much of the coverage was cast in the passive terms of not “prolonging” a life rather than starving a woman to death.
Just to repeat, the tactics are:
- Conduct a poll designed to make it look as if the action is unpopular.
- Smear a Republican leader as a distraction.
- Write articles about divisions in conservative or Republican ranks.
- Use euphemisms to rephrase the issue to make the conservatives look unreasonable.