DomPost man in the Beehive Vernon Small: As National leader John Key is fond of saying: Explaining is losing.
I find myself forced to question this – does he really say that? Google sure don’t find any instances. Gerry Brownless said it in the house a year ago, but that’s about it. So does Vernon Small really testify that Key says this when off-mike? That’s a hell of a bean to throw, if so, because it comes from the arch-demon himself:
“Explaining is losing.” This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything — anything at all — and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.
– from a summary of ‘Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George Bush Presidential’
Speaking of election advice and strategy, Nicky Hager’s continued that unfamiliar “journalism” thing with a report on how John Key and the National core have enlisted extensive multi-year support from despised election dirty-tricks experts Crosby, Stills & Textor. As usual with Hager’s stuff, his story is then picked up and covered mostly in terms of “who does that Nicky Hager think he is” and “how is he getting all this information” rather than actually paying attention to what he’s dug up. But that’s the way things are done now, sad to say.
(Hager is a special guest at this Thursday’s Drinking Liberally in Wellington. I’m gonna be there.)
It’s an update/adaptation of the old and actually well-known saying:
“Success needs no explanation, failure permits none.”
Which I’ve heard bandied about quite a bit at wargaming events over the years.
Perhaps, but I think the sense in which Rove used it is sufficiently different from that to make it personally attributable to him.
Also, if you google the complete phrase you only get two pages of hits, either about Rove or about Vernon Small’s John Key claim. This specific phraseology is not in common use – its very, very distinctive.
Well, it’s nothing new in propaganda theory, surely.
“…Effective propaganda must limit its points of a few and these points must be repeated until even the last member of the audience understands what is meant by them.”
“…the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious…The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
Both from Goebbels, of course.
He would certainly agree that if you have to explain yourself you’ve lost.
Also, especially if you’re lying, it is hard to explain.
Again, I’m not trying to say this general idea is anything new, just the specific. The formulation “explaining is losing” is a Karl Rove-ism. It’s a distinctive formulation that belongs to him, in particular. It isn’t something he’s borrowed from historical usage, it isn’t a general phrase that anyone would just randomly come up with through general study of propaganda techniques.
And I think John Key sloganising with Karl Rove’s (contemptible) mantra would be of significant public interest. I would hope Small wouldn’t make that claim if it wasn’t true.
Yeah, I took the point to be less “John Key is using propaganda” (big f**king surprise) than “John Key is using a phrase taken from Karl Rove, and is also using the same media weasels employed by John Howard”. The specificity seems very important, to me anyway.
I can see why the Hager issue has focussed in on the leaking business. That Key is using dubious international pollsters (who have a losing track record) isn’t huge news. It’s politics – old school style. And, sadly, I think the NZ public and/or media are buying into the change in nothing but name idea at the moment.
What is fascinating is how Hager is getting his information. Surely someone within the party is leaking it, the question is who and why? This is good old fashioned cloak and dagger stuff and Hager has got the ability to break election campaigns – re: GE corn and Exclusive Bretheren.
There is plenty of information about how John Key operates still to come to light, he’s such an unknown that it’s going to be interesting to see what Hager will put forward next and what the next three months are going show us.
p.s. Have finally got Vodafone to remove pesky parental controls off my broadband – for some reason it kept blocking your blog … You are quite a power, my friend, for Vodafone UK clearly thinks you are corrupting young minds …
sonal, I’m in halfway agreement only.
I think a healthy media would be much more interested in the provenance and track record of Key’s media advisors. That C/T have a history of going well beyond what is ethically (let alone morally) appropriate in their campaigns is a matter of record. What I would like to see is some high-profile analysis of what C/T have done and what, therefore, we might expect from Key this campaign – some kind of public education, in other words.
The business of politics does not find its checks and balances, or its restraint, within itself. It is the voting public who bring restraint, and the media is both the proxy for and the bottleneck to the public. Key and National are free to pull in any operator they like, as they are free to make any decision they see fit, but in a healthy democracy the media should be communicating to the public their choices and the meanings thereof.
I don’t think the media is functioning as it should in New Zealand – far from it. In fact, as Glenn Greenwald has been exhaustively documenting in his Salon.com blog, I think western media generally has been co-opted by the political machine. Media providers have bought into the same perspective of politics held by its practitioners – a game with no rules except what you can get away with. It is the media that should be holding political operators to a higher standard. Who else can? Without the media’s implicit adoption of this role, the voter has neither the information nor the power to do so.
Ultimately, again, the decline of the media is the problem, and it may be a largely insoluble one. The online news channels (blogs, indie news sites like Scoop) do not yet have the influence to challenge this role, and are fraught with their own complications. The UK system of ideological competition among media voices, Daily Telegraphy vs. Guardian, has its merits but tends to result in a tribal, pre-rational discourse.
Nor is media failure new – it is as it ever was. I am wary of any mythology of a “golden age” of media when doughty investigative reporters spoke truth to power and held governors to account – while the media has certainly changed in the last two decades to buy into the political methodology, it was always captured and compromised in one way or another.
The media, particularly in New Zealand, isn’t all failure all the time. Great journalism continues to emerge in mainstream outlets all over the world, living up to the purpose of the fourth estate. Nicky Hager is, as you mention, singlehandedly able to influence the course of elections due to his journalistic influence and reach; Seymour Hersh in the U.S. had massive impact through reporting on Iraq in the last few years; etc.
It is probably too much to expect that the media become Hager and Hersh, all the time, but we should be able to expect that this kind of journalism (when it appears) should be given due respect.
This is the standard we should demand of our news media: to remember, when reminded, what its role should be.
(huh. that went long.)
That is a hella low standard to be demanding.
Which I guess makes it all the more shocking that it needs demanding.
Low – yeah. But I see it as a starting point, not an ending point. I’d like to think our news media are capable of at least that.
Morgue, you’re completely right but I’ve personally given up on NZ media – Fairfax’s treatment of the Clydesdale issue (putting a phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere in the actual paper in quotation marks) and the failure of rival organisations to scrutinise a)what Fairfax or rather Tim Pankhurst had done and b)to actually explore Clydesdale’s credibility on the issue until a whole three weeks later (information I already knew within 48 hours of the story breaking thanks to my own use of the internet), pretty much cremated that coffin.
The question is, truly, how influential is the general media in NZ?
You can’t really expect much from a media culture that accepts TV News sponsored by insurance and finance companies