The Rovian Research Behind Maureen Dowd's Anti-Hillary Screeds

[still_one]

August 1, 2015 ANALYSIS
By Peter Daou and Tom Watson

The shameful episode of the New York Times and its grossly irresponsible and false story about Hillary’s emails has brought the crisis of ethics in U.S. media to the fore.

As of this writing, the leadership of the Times has neither apologized nor taken appropriate responsibility for their bungled and dangerous story, despite an extraordinary letter from the Clinton campaign's Communications Director and a well-deserved backlash among the commentariat. Instead, we are treated by the paper to yet another exercise in anti-Hillary vitriol from Maureen Dowd. As usual, Dowd's writing seethes with Hillary hatred. What's worse is that in this column, Dowd uses the tragic death of Beau Biden as a platform to smear Hillary.

We’ve spent the better part of 2015 writing about the complex process by which Hillary’s integrity is assaulted by reporters, bloggers, columnists and pundits. We’ve made the case that her political fortunes will rise and fall depending on how well her campaign and her supporters fight back against this process of character assassination.

To that end, Peter has identified the key anti-Hillary memes (categories and subcategories) that have permeated coverage for decades:

• CALCULATING (Scheming, crafty, manipulative)

• SECRETIVE (Suspicious, paranoid, uncommunicative)

• POLARIZING (Divisive, alienating)

• UNTRUSTWORTHY (Corrupt, deceitful, dishonest, unethical)

• OVER-AMBITIOUS (Will do or say anything to win)

• INAUTHENTIC (Disingenuous, fake, unlikable, insincere)

• INHUMAN (Machine-like, robotic, abnormal, cold)

• OVER-CONFIDENT (Inevitable, defiant, imperious, regal)

• OLD (Out of touch, represents the past)

In The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary, Peter explains how these memes work and where they originate:

From a revealing report on Karl Rove’s Crossroads:

“An expensive and sophisticated effort is underway to test and refine the most potent lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton, and, ultimately, to persuade Americans that she does not deserve their votes. Republican groups are eager to begin building a powerful case against the woman they believe will be the Democratic nominee, and to infuse the public consciousness with those messages. The effort to vilify Mrs. Clinton could ultimately cost several hundred million dollars, given the variety and volume of political organizations involved.”

Crossroads' goal is to indoctrinate the public with anti-Hillary narratives, to insert carefully tested negative memes into the public debate.

Voters need to understand that what they think they know about Hillary is often the result of sophisticated propaganda techniques, where tightly-crafted talking points are focus-grouped and deployed by shadowy GOP groups then magnified by the mainstream media and pundits.

This is the subtext to Maureen Dowd’s new, vicious attack against Hillary. Dowd’s words are chosen meticulously: they fit perfectly into the narratives and frames that have been developed for over two decades to smear Hillary. Each of these terms is taken from Dowd’s new op-ed – many are verbatim matches with our compendium of anti-Hillary memes:

“Acting all innocent, disingenuous, egregious transgressions, militant fans, craving a championship, surreptitious, wanting to win at all costs, calculating, history of subterfuge, crafty, sketchy value system, seamy, Faustian bargain, sheen of inevitability, robotic, queenly attitude, suspicious mind-set, unsavory.”

Delivering such excessive negativity in one piece is not opinion writing. It is not journalism. It is a personal vendetta aided and abetted by the New York Times, with the intention of spreading potent sexist frames crafted by conservative opposition researchers.


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