Robert Reich: How Republicans reinforce campaign of lies
How Republicans reinforce campaign of lies
Robert Reich
Saturday, September 8, 2012
..........Notwithstanding these refutations, the Romney campaign continues to make these charges.
Most political campaigns are guilty of exaggeration. Some distort the truth. But rarely if ever has one resorted to such bald-faced lies - even after they're shown to be lies.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues to make these and other false claims because they're effective, swaying previously undecided voters Romney's way. But this raises a more basic question: How can these false claims remain effective when they've been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is that the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots - financed by a mountain of campaign money - that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have disproven them. ..........
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The second means the GOP has developed to protect its mistruths is discrediting the mainstream media - asserting that it's run by "liberal elites" who can't be trusted to tell the truth. "I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate in January in what has become a standard GOP attack line. ................
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The third means the GOP uses to protect itself is its own media outlets - led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere. Even if these outlets don't spread the lies directly, they can at least spread doubt about what's true. .............
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/reich/article/How-Republicans-reinforce-campaign-of-lies-3850026.php
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