USED AND ABUSED
Often, I fear, the freedom we claim as a vital part of our lives, is being used against us.
I have serious doubts about the fact that suddenly, from out of the past, hundeds of New York firemen's widows have, overnight and seemingly on their own, found their tearful way into TV studios all over the nation voicing identically worded complaints about the nature of President George W. Bush's intitial campaign ad.
I can't quite bring myself to agree that such a coincidental arousal of weeping widow words might come about through chance and unnaturally prompt attention of widows to the artistic patterns and linguistic allusions made in a one minute TV commercial spot.
We listeners and viewers are being worked over carefully by experts at trickery and double-talk.
Some individul or small group of Bush-bashers, obvioously had prior access to the contgent of the commercial well in advance of distribution. Eager collaberators in the nation's communicaions industries, stood ready and eager to received the packaged propaganda release as if it were a legitimate "news" item.
We, the viewers, have once more been vicimized at the hand of such dishonest purveyorsof lies and planned deception. The same tactics were used the Clinton days when a WehiteHouse "spin: group did the same to new itxms for eek-pend release. Perhps you remember how Sunday TV' news and shows all worked the subject around to a set topic and actually used identical words sent out to all points by the staffer in the White House who had put the party spin on the item. That ls the way the word “gravitas” worked itself into the American language. A spin writer had said a certian individual had “gravitas” and all the panel personalities parroted it perpetually throughout each and every week-end “news” show.
We were taken for an informational “ride” then, and we are being “taken” again and again by such subtle, underhand manipulations of much of the news content of the day. No channel is free of such dangers.. radio frequencies, TV channels, cable connections, Internet pages, newspapers, magazines, newsletters,and columns we read and write on line.
The maxim seems to be:Don't believe anything you see, hear or read until you have checked it with your inner fund of common-sense
A.L.M. March 6, 2004 [c395wds]
