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November 16, 2007
Hillary’s Brownshirts Drown Out Competition
Voters hoping to learn more about the positions of Democratic presidential candidates came away from Thursday night’s Las Vegas slugfest empty, confused and a bit angry. Even though CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer promised that each candidate would have ample time to articulate their key points during the broadcast, much of the face time went to Sen. Hillary Clinton. When the camera wasn’t on her, the questions were about her or the other candidates were talking about the former First Lady.
Following the Russert debacle in the last debate, the Clinton campaign went to work on Blitzer, turning Wolf into a lamb. No tough questions were posed to the woman who claims to be able to stand up to tyrants and terrorists. Worse yet, whenever one of the other candidates said anything critical of Mrs. Clinton, her cheering section loudly booed.
Along with last week’s “planted question” scandal, the Clinton machine’s strategy of media manipulation is becoming increasingly clear: intimidate journalists, manufacture “news” and silence dissent.
If the election was being held in 1968 and not 2008, I might be more concerned. Clinton’s Nixonian posture with regard to the media is based on a model that no longer exists. The reason there has been no “Cronkite moment” that secured America’s defeat in Iraq is that the New Media has allowed enough of the truth to seep through the liberal media blockade to neutralize the antiwar propaganda.
During the 1990s, Hillary was able to discount critics on the right by referring to them as the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and the sycophantic liberal media dutifully went along with the ploy. However, the rapidly changing media landscape renders that tactic ineffective. In the past, it was possible to shout down contrary voices, like Hillary’s brownshirts tried to do Thursday night, but the Internet prevents that from happening on a larger scale.
As I discuss in my book, “The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report", Democrats are not dealing with the New Media well because they are not used to competing in the free marketplace of ideas. Tim Russert pierced the media bubble that has surrounded Clinton since she came back to Washington in 1992 and left her gasping for breath in an unfamiliar environment. Previously, the only tough question posed to her came from me in 2005 when I suggested to President Bush that Sen. Clinton was “divorced from reality” because of her view that the economy was on the verge of collapse and social security was rock solid. As a result, Mrs. Clinton’s “goon squad” at Media Matters came after me, just as they have done to anyone who dares to criticize her. Observe what it did to Russert as well as the “don’ts” Media Matters put out before the CNN debate.
One of the things Barack Obama is right about is that Mrs. Clinton is stuck in the 1960s. Certainly, the Wellesley grad has not strayed far from the radical socialist orthodoxy she espoused as a college senior. So too, very little has changed in her perception of the media. Clinton is banking on the Old Media’s willingness to buy into her Potemkin village of contrived cackles and obfuscation. What she has not yet come to grips with is how to deal with the New Media and keep it from breaking through her façade to expose the real Hillary.
Posted by jeffgannon at November 16, 2007 09:29 AM
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