Horse said to Platt: I'm saying that your use of the term [death panel] is both propaganda and emotive nonsense.
dmb says: That's right. Maybe you've never heard of Frank Luntz. As Wiki puts it, he is "an American political consultant and pollster. His most recent work has been with the Fox News Channel as a frequent commentator and analyst, as well as running focus groups after presidential debates. Luntz's specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.” He is also an author of business books dealing with communication strategies and public opinion. Luntz's current company, The Word Doctors, specializes in message creation and image management for commercial and political clients." He's the one who came up with "death taxes" as a new name for the inheritance tax. He's the main wordsmith for Republican causes. In the case of "death panels", however, I think that phrase is the product of a public relations agency that does a lot of work for Republican causes, or anybody with enough cash. The Rachel Maddow show (news) did an expose' of this particular PR agency and its connections to various conservative political organizations. They showed how the town hall outrage we saw during the health care debate was bought and paid for. I'm sure the angry citizens were sincere, but they were only doing what that PR agency wanted them to do. It was engineered for cold hard cash, for financial reasons, by large corporations. Naturally, the truth of the matter has absolutely nothing to do with it. We're talking about professional bullshit artists and they're pretty good at it. It almost worked. Or rather, it worked to some extent. The law passed but it was pretty weak. How many times have I bought into some manufactured bullshit without realizing it, I wonder? In the run-up to the first Gulf War, a young woman testified before Congress. She told a heart-breaking story. Iraqi soldiers had invaded her country and when they took over a hospital near the border, the soldiers took sick little babies out of their incubators and threw them away like garbage. She told this story just before Congress was supposed to vote to authorize war - or not. Later we learned that this young woman was a member of the Royal family and that her story was invented for her by a public relations agency. Death taxes, death panels, dead babies. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that these terms are designed to push your emotional buttons. They're designed to manipulate opinion. Doesn't that make you angry, that people deliberately distort the truth for power and money? How is that not a crime? It'd be impossible to adjudicate, I suppose. Propaganda and PR: The best truth money can buy. Sigh. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
