I did not change any wording.
Associated Propaganda?
By Wayne Collins
[email protected] This was the first publicly available news response I found from AP (Associated Press) on the Jeff Gannon story. It perfectly illustrates how the presentation of information can skew our individual view of the story being told, and how we unknowingly fall for it every time. Maybe we can do something about that.
Let me show you the difference between propaganda and news.
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Reporter Quits Amid Credential Questions
Thursday February 10, 2005 6:31 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) - A writer who attracted attention by asking President Bush a loaded question at a news conference last month has resigned amid questions about his identity and background.
James D. Guckert, who wrote under the name Jeff Gannon, said on his Web site that he was leaving ``because of the attention being paid to me.'' He had been Washington bureau chief for Talon News outlet associated with another Web site, GOPUSA.
Guckert frequently attended White House press briefings over the last two years and asked pointedly conservative questions. Called on by Bush at a Jan. 26 news conference, Guckert said Senate Democratic leaders were painting a bleak picture of the economy and he asked Bush how the president would work ``with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.''
The question prompted scrutiny, particularly from bloggers. Guckert was linked with online domain addresses suggestive of gay pornography. Guckert, a former resident of Wilmington, Del., told The (Wilmington) News Journal newspaper that he had registered the domain names for a client while he was working to set up a Web-hosting business.
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Now don’t blink, it is very subtle.
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Reporter Quits Amid Credential Questions
Thursday February 10, 2005 6:31 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) - A conservative writer who attracted attention by asking President Bush a loaded question at a news conference last month has resigned amid questions about his identity and background.
James D. Guckert, who wrote under the name Jeff Gannon, said on his Web site that he was leaving ``because of the attention being paid to me.'' He had been Washington bureau chief for Talon News, a conservative online news outlet associated with another Web site, GOPUSA.
Guckert frequently attended White House press briefings over the last two years and asked pointedly conservative questions. Called on by Bush at a Jan. 26 news conference, Guckert said Senate Democratic leaders were painting a bleak picture of the economy and he asked Bush how the president would work ``with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.''
The question prompted scrutiny, particularly from liberal bloggers. Guckert was linked with online domain addresses suggestive of gay pornography. Guckert, a former resident of Wilmington, Del., told The (Wilmington) News Journal newspaper that he had registered the domain names for a client while he was working to set up a Web-hosting business.
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Each is a story, but because I took the emotional hooks out of the first one, they read completely different.
It is important that you know propaganda is like character building designed to invoke an emotional connection to something about a specific character. The first character Gannon/Guckert is viewed differently depending on your emotional response to the words “a conservative writer.” If you are a conservative, you would tend to identify more favorably to the character and if you were liberal, you would see him less favorably. This is just how people associate with other people by what is common between them.
I had a Spanish teacher in community college that always reiterated this in class: Repetition is the process of recollection. Thank you for grinding this into me. Anyway, you all get the point; it is about reinforcing a response, behavior, or thought. In this case, what you have in common with the character: in each of the first three paragraphs the reference to conservative appears “a conservative writer,“ “a conservative online news outlet,” and “pointedly conservative questions.” Each statement is reinforcing what you stereotypically believe about a conservative and associating your beliefs to each of the previous statements.
When you get to the words “liberal bloggers” and they associate the word "liberal" to the character bloggers, it engages how you feel about liberals and labels the character with your felt response. The bloggers, writer, news outlet, and even the questions are characters and because of how you perceive them, you afford them your trust or skepticism.
There are also instances of misinformation used to describe some of the scenery and props that help portray the story. When they quote him saying “because of the attention being paid to me,” they actually changed the punctuation in the sentence and the words which changed the meaning. On the jeffgannon.com site, the sentence originally ends “paid to me, and my family.” I can’t think of a reason why one would cut that out, but changing the meaning of someone’s statement doesn’t quite add up if this is journalism. I checked the jeffgannon.com site and now the text on it has been altered to match the quoted statement in the AP article.
There is also a more notable error surrounding the problems with Mr. Gannon’s website addresses. They portrayed them as your average vanilla gay porn sites. When in reality ,the names alone advertise homosexual prostitution of military men (militaryescortsM4M.com).
If you are conservative you are more then likely not to sympathize with Mr. Gannon\Guckert and provably not going to look at anything about this any more seriously -- possibly ever. The liberal on the other hand is going to get stuck in the details, which will turn off the conservatives because they really don’t care. Altering the details could encourage the idea that there are two versions of the story, when notably there should not be this problem if this were journalism.
Although we all read the same text, we build characters individually, and because of how we perceive the world and others, determines the story we build. This happens to all of us without fail; it is part of who we are to associate the world to what we already think of it. Fortunately, though there is something that can be done to fight and expose it. When you read your news, try to subtract those extra words and ask yourself if it would change your opinion of the characters being portrayed or change the meaning of the information being presented.
I am not sure if this AP piece was just easy for me to see the manipulation, but I think I will be paying a little closer attention to the next report off the wire. I hope that many conservatives have the opportunity to understand this problem and reiterate it to other like-minded folks. This is not a liberal/conservative issue; this is really an American issue. The fault here should not be associated to anyone’s perceived notion of whom or what was the cause of this type of reporting. I am certain that they will brush everything off as coincidence and that the wire report was not meant to be manipulative. In fact, though I know it does matter and until unlike-minded folks demand that it stops, I don’t think it will.
The original wire I found from AP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-479... What’s left of JeffGannon.com
http://www.jeffgannon.com 
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