From: Harvey Newstrom (harv@gate.net)
Date: Sat Jan 24 1998 - 08:12:30 MST
At 10:00pm -0500 1/22/98, Kathryn Aegis wrote:
>What irritates me the most about this situation is that this whole
>story is only in the allegation stage, with absolutely no proof
This is technically true. It made me think of a great meme-generating
political machine. I do not claim this is true, because imagine this
possible scenario: The Whitewater team leaks the details about the tapes,
calls a press conference, and indicates that a deposition will occur the
next day. All the news organizations send their top people and start
scheduling news specials to cover the events. When all the news people
show up for the press conference, they are told that it was a mistake and
that there would be no news. The deposition is postponed indefinitely.
Now the news media have nothing official to put in all their news specials
which they have already announced and schedules. So now, all the networks
are having hour long specials with no real news, just rehashing old
scandals and speculating on the new one with no real information.
Again, I'm not claiming this was intentional. But, it makes me consider
the possibility of leading the media to schedule news shows without facts,
and then leaving them without evidence so they have nothing to present but
allegations, so they present that. The idea of this occurring is a good
lesson in meme-spreading. This latest allegation is much more important
and believed by the public than any of the previous scandals, even though
previous allegations have had much more proof than anything we have yet
heard about this one. It seems that the way it was presented is more
important to meme-infection than the actual content. The amount of
coverage it receives in the news media makes it seem more factual than any
real evidence.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto: harv@gate.net> PGP 5.5 Fingerprint F746 7A20 EB7D 27BA 80A5 4473 D8E1 6A54 1EB0 56F7 PGP Public Key from <http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371>, <ldap://certserver.pgp.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:48:31 MST