|
|
:: Thursday, September 16, 2004 ::
CBS Wins Golden Spinny Award for Memogate
The Spinspeak Letter has awarded a special Golden Spinny to CBS Anchor Dan Rather and CBS for its handling of the fake documents imbroglio.
Rather and CBS along with Democratic surrogates have offered at least seven varieties of spin in less than a week as alternate explanations to crass, pajama-clad disbelievers of CBS’ insistence that its newly-discovered documents trashing President Bush’s Air National Guard service are not fakes. The seven varieties:
The objective journalism spin – Our reporting on the fake documents is highly professional and accurate even if they are proven to be fake (which we insist they are not.)
The truth-will-out spin – The content of the fake documents is accurate even though the documents submitted to prove the content true are really fakes.
The victim spin – We have been had by some nerdy, irresponsible computer trickster.
The conspiracy spin – The fake documents were given to us by agents of that devilish plotter, Bush Strategist Karl Rove, as part of the vast right wing conspiracy.
The technological marvel spin – The documents could indeed have been made to look like 21st Century computer processed documents more than 30 years ago. All it would take would be a highly adroit typist in an Air National Guard office in Texas using an advanced IBM Selectric with a variety of handily installable font balls or maybe a type setter-printer or maybe a secret PC prototype being tested before being shipped to Cambodia.
"They” are dodging spin = The Republicans are using the fact that the documents are fakes to avoid answering the unsubstantiated slanders in the fake documents.
The first-to-tell-you spin – Should we be wrong, and we are not saying we are wrong, we’ll be first to tell you and “want” to do it.
Criteria for Golden Spinnies include “innovation under fire, speed of change in argument, maintenance of sincerity and reasonableness of tone despite extreme provocation including laughter, strong self-delusionary capability and total shamelessness.”
:: James Baar 9/16/2004 08:10:00 AM [+] ::
...  
:: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 ::
And That's the Way It Is: the Accurate Faux Facts
The major flap over CBS' “reporting” on Bush’s National Guard service record based on very apparently fake documents puts under the spin detector’s microscope for study a whole new category of spinspeak: the accurate faux fact.
Initially, CBS Anchor Dan Rather, with all the sincere relish and mock dourness of a certified Bush basher, reported "new" sensational facts trashing the President's service in the Air National Guard during the Viet Nam War. The “facts” were based on “newly discovered” documents.
Within minutes, the “report” began to fray as the authenticity of the documents was questioned on the Internet. Increasingly, hour after hour the documents were exposed by various experts as poorly constructed fakes. Among the more damning of numerous defects: they were miraculously composed by computers and software that didn’t exist in the early 1970’s when the documents allegedly were written.
It were as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled a long-lost Tintoretto of St. Jerome. And there was the saint looking out of his cave at a distant landscape that included a very small World Trade Center in the distance; also the paint was acrylic; also the ornate gold frame was made of genuine Lexan.
CBS and Rather unloosed a jumbo cloud of spin: they insisted that the documents were authentic; or they insisted that at least they were told the documents were authentic; or they had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the source which they would not disclose on their journalistic honor; and, in any case, they insisted that the “reporting” of what the documents said was totally accurate even if the documents were fakes.
There was the breakthrough in spin technique: the establishment of a new level of journalistic excellence for our times: the careful, professional, absolutely, totally, completely accurate, repetitive reporting of humbug regardless of truth.
So what's your problem?
:: James Baar 9/14/2004 02:43:00 PM [+] ::
...
Ever Onward in the Science of Spinspeak
Two more technical categories for scholars in the linguistic science of spinspeak:
disingenuous = nicespeak terminology for calculated lie or strongly misleading statement.
Employed apparently to his great satisfaction by Sen. John McCain (R-NM) in describing Movie Producer Michael Moore’s attacks on the Bush Administration and the Second Iraq War. McCain, without naming him, called Moore “a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons…”
taqiyya = the art of dissimulation grounded in the Islamic strategic concept that one never owes the truth to unbelievers.
Prof. Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins writes in the Wall Street Journal that taqijja has been used “to perfection” by Islamists to take advantage the pluralism of the West while thwarting Muslim assimilation. Ajami is author of Dream Palace of the Arabs.
:: James Baar 9/14/2004 10:48:00 AM [+] ::
...
|
