Pictures and dog whistles

You know the old saying...a picture is worth a thousand words. I'm one who endorses that 100%. Although I'm not that schooled in how our brains work, I think part of the reason is that the information we take in from a picture (or music and perhaps other forms of art) enters our thought processes in a different way and tends to by-pass many of the rational filters that operate when we read or listen to words.

That sometimes is a beautiful thing and its why any form of art is a powerful way to communicate. But it also means that power is available to reinforce prejudices and stereotypes that may prove uncomfortable to the rational mind but reside in a more embedded form in all of us emotionally. In other words, pictures make great dog whistles.

I ran across an example of that today when I visited The Daily Caller. Yes, I read there quite regularly. Its a right wing site created by Tucker Carlson that is about as subtle as a jackhammer when it comes to propaganda. It helps me keep track of how the opposition is thinking and framing things.

Anyway, there are two stories highlighted there today. The first one is titled Young voters unenthusiastic about Obama's re-election prospects. Here's the photo that accompanies that story.



In contrast is another story titled Unemployment benefit claims drop, but real joblessness persists. Here's the picture with that one.



You see what they did there? Of all the photos they could have used to represent young voters and the unemployed, they picked the ones that reinforce the message that young voters are predominantly white and the unemployed are mostly people of color. Readers won't actually think about that message...it just slips in and is put alongside all the other emotionally laden prejudices we've all built up over the years in this culture.

While The Daily Caller is a publication that seems to revel in this kind of thing, the truth is that it happens all the time in most of our media. The way to combat it is to bring those messages out for a rational look and think about what they're telling us. In other words, tune in to the dog whistles embedded in pictures.

It's over!

As a way to mark the end, I thought it would be interesting to go back to what our President - then an unknown Illinois State Senator - said back in 2002 just before it all began.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics...

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with bin Laden and al-Qaida, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to make sure that the U.N. inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair. The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not — we will not — travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

How prescient he was about the challenges that really mattered!

We all know that then President Bush didn't heed these words and marched off into a war that need not have been fought. And now President Obama has kept his promise to end it. We also know that he has willingly joined in the fight he talked about against ignorance, intolerance, corruption, greed, poverty and despair. Those battles still rage on as the struggles to which we must commit.

If you want to prognosticate about Republicans, pay attention to the epistemic closure

Jared Bernstein is filling in for Steve Benen yesterday and today while Benen takes a very well deserved couple of days off. I enjoy reading Bernstein (he's on my blogroll) but lately I've been noticing that he's making the same mistake many regular journalists are making when it comes to analyzing the Republican primary.

Yesterday Bernstein noted the all-out attack on Gingrich from other candidates as well as some slippage in his poll numbers. Here's what he attributes it to.

One factor? Here’s where Newt’s unpopularity among highly visible conservative opinion leaders matters. Because practically no one appears to be rallying to his side.

When Bernstein refers to the "highly visible conservative opinion leaders," he's talking about the Republican Party political establishment. And he thinks what they say affects the Republican voter base. I don't agree.

This week Jonathan Freedland captured what I've been trying to say all along. Only he was much better and more comprehensive in doing so. He's referring to what Josh Marshall called "The Murdoch Primary." In other words, its all about Fox News.

It's not just usual-suspect lefties and professional Murdoch-haters who say it, mischievously exaggerating the cable TV network's influence. Dick Morris, veteran political operative and Fox regular, noted the phenomenon himself the other day while sitting on the Fox sofa. "This is a phenomenon of this year's election," he said. "You don't win Iowa in Iowa. You win it on this couch. You win it on Fox News." In other words, it is Fox – with the largest cable news audience, representing a huge chunk of the Republican base – that is, in effect, picking the party's nominee to face Obama next November.

This doesn't work crudely – not that crudely, anyway. Roger Ailes, the Fox boss, does not deliver a newspaper-style endorsement of a single, anointed candidate. Rather, some are put in the sunlight, and others left to moulder in the shade. The Media Matters organisation keeps tabs on what it calls the Fox Primary, measuring by the minute who gets the most airtime. It has charted a striking correlation, with an increase in a candidate's Fox appearances regularly followed by a surge in the opinion polls. Herman Cain and Rick Perry both benefited from that Fox effect, with Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, the latest: in the days before he broke from the pack, Gingrich topped the Fox airtime chart. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney cannot seem to break through a 20-to-25% ceiling in the polls – hardly surprising considering, as the league table shows, he has never been a Fox favourite.

The other person who's been on this story since he got banished from conservative circles for calling health care reform the Republican Waterloo is David Frum. Here's what he said about it more recently.

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

Over a year ago Julian Sanchez started a blogging firestorm after he talked about "epistemic closure" on the political right. What he meant by that is that they have their sources of news that they pay attention to and anything that contradicts what they hear from those sources is dismissed. In other words, its a closed-loop system. Sometimes the louder people speak against what it is they have been led to believe, the more the system kicks in to demonize the source of the dissonance. Here's Brent Bozell doing just that.

The media elite and the Republican ruling class are remarkably similar in their political projection for the coming year. Journalists spent the entire year savaging every fast-rising challenger to Mitt Romney. The GOP's power pundits became equally agitated at the sniff of a conservative anywhere near the top of the GOP pack.

It's the odor of extremism that both the elites in the media and the GOP have detested — always.

So here we are, on the cusp of the election year, and both these groups have one primary target: Newt Gingrich.

My advice to journalists who want to try to predict what the Republican base voters will do is to suspend your rational addiction to the policy issues, the back-and-forth between the candidates, the arguments over the candidate's personal history and/or proposals, etc. What you should be paying attention to is what happens on Fox News and conservative talk radio.

As an example, this from Fox News yesterday was not a mistake. Here's the Murdoch Primary at work. Get it?

We Can't Wait - 16 days to go

Holder takes on voting laws and other DOJ news

This comes as no surprise to those of us who have been watching Attorney General Holder and the work of his Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday entered the turbulent political waters of voting rights, signaling that the Justice Department would be aggressive in reviewing new voting laws that civil rights advocates say will dampen minority participation in next year’s elections.

Declaring in a speech that protecting ballot access for all eligible voters “must be viewed not only as a legal issue but as a moral imperative,” Mr. Holder urged Americans to “call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters.”

The speech by Mr. Holder could inflame a smoldering partisan dispute over race and ballot access as the 2012 campaign cycle intensifies. It comes as the Justice Department’s civil rights division is scrutinizing a series of new state voting laws that were enacted — largely by Republican officials — in the name of fighting fraud.

This happens as we learn that the Supreme Court will be ruling on the Arizona Immigration Law. That one could have wide-ranging impact on the challenges DOJ currently has underway to the immigration laws in South Carolina, Alabama and Utah.

Remember a little over a month ago when the poutragers were...well, poutraged...over the looming settlement in the state attorney general's case against mortgage fraud? Based on tips from unnamed sources, they were certain a settlement was close and that it would be a cave - not by the attorney generals - but, of course, by the DOJ and Holder. Turns out it was a classic case of pre-emptive outrage. As we know now, there was no looming settlement and we still don't know the details of what one will look like.

Coming from the other direction, The Daily Caller is keeping up its relentless attach on Holder over the Fast and Furious initiative. They're still working on rounding up Republican members of Congress and presidential candidates who are willing to join their effort to get Holder fired. And President Obama is having none of it!

We Can't Wait - 17 days to go

Which candidate has the best ground game in Iowa?

Yep, you guessed right..its these guys.

The Obama campaign is touting what it says is already a superior ground operation in Iowa, saying the offices and thousands of volunteer hours it already has up and running in the state are a sign that it’s better prepared for the general election than the other side.

The numbers are indeed stark. While no Republican candidate has more than one campaign office in Iowa, the Obama campaign has eight offices open across the state.

What has all that manpower done since April, when the reelect kicked off? Some stats from the Obama campaign in Iowa:

• Held over 1,000 trainings, planning sessions, house parties, and phone banks.
• Made over 250,000 calls to supporters.
• Held over 2,500 one-on-one conversations.
• Opened eight campaign offices across the state for the November 2012 election- Cedar Rapids, Sioux City, Des Moines, Waterloo, Davenport, Iowa City, Dubuque and Council Bluffs.

And its not just Iowa.

At a briefing with reporters Tuesday morning in Washington, top strategists for the president touted their organization in Iowa and the rest of the nation.

“I think we have more staffers on the ground in Iowa than any of the other campaigns do right now,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said. “We have structure on the ground in all the key states — I don’t think any of [the Republicans] do.”

So Mitt can rely on all the TV advertising that Karl Rove's American Crossroads can buy and Newt can rely on all the talking heads at Faux News and talk radio. Our Community-Organizer-In-Chief will build his efforts on the most valuable resource out there...the person-to-person kind.