Reply #50: Chris Lehane spread a good deal of the "unelectable"

[drfemoe]

smear around while he was working for Kerry. Dean supporters had nothing to do with it, but you don't know how right you are about the media.
>> partial snip
The media giants quickly responded by crushing his high-flying campaign with the greatest of ease. This time, they didn’t even have to invent a scandal in order to achieve the desired result; merely by chanting the word “unelectable” at maximum volume, the mainstream media maneuvered Democratic voters into switching their support to someone who poses no threat to the status quo.

John Kerry is a member in good standing of the feeble Daschle/Biden/Feinstein wing of the Democratic Party, a group of politicians whose disagreements with the mercantile elite tend to be merely rhetorical. Any doubts about Kerry’s level of commitment to his stated progressive beliefs were conclusively answered in 1994 when he proclaimed himself “delighted” with the Republican takeover of Congress. The media oligarchy knows that a general election race between Kerry and George W. Bush will insure a continuation of its monopoly, regardless of who wins.

The news cartel had always been hostile to Dean; independent surveys revealed that he had received the most negative coverage of any candidate except Dennis Kucinich (the only other contender who strongly favors mandatory media divestment). But after his statement on Hardball, reporting about Dean abruptly came to an end and was replaced by supposition. The existing conjecture in political circles about his ability to win was transformed into a thunderous media mantra that drowned out all other issues

By mid-December, the news divisions of the four major television networks were reporting as fact that Dean was unelectable. The print media echoed the theme; on December 17, the Washington Post printed a front-page story that posited Dean could not win the presidency. The Post quickly followed up with an onslaught of articles and editorials reasserting that claim. Before the month was over, Dean’s lack of electability had been highlighted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and every other major paper in the United States.

As 2004 began, Time and Newsweek simultaneously ran cover stories emphasizing that Dean was unelectable. In the weeks before the Iowa caucus, the ongoing topic of discussion on the political panel shows was that Dean was unelectable. National talk radio shows repeatedly stressed that Dean was unelectable. The corporate Internet declared that Dean was unelectable. And the mainstream media continued with the storyline that Dean was unelectable right up until Iowans attended their caucuses. Iowa Democrats could not watch a television or listen to a radio or read a newspaper or go online without learning that Howard Dean was unelectable.

It was the classic Big Lie. Through the power of repetition, the corporate media – which has been wrong about who would win the popular vote in two of the last three presidential elections – inculcated the public with the message that Dean could not win. Pollster John Zogby wrote, “Howard Dean was the man of the year, but that was 2003. In 2004, electability has become the issue and John Kerry has benefited.”

The unexamined factor is how electability became “the issue”. It had never before been the dominant consideration in Democratic primaries, because voters had focused on policy rather than crystal ball gazing. Electability was this campaign’s version of “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet”: it was a media contrivance that was used to manipulate voters.

http://www.makethemaccountable.com/podvin/media/040201_TheScream.htm