OK
The propaganda almost seems to will the weakest candidate to the top of the ticket for either party. And the propaganda works because people are that lazy when voting.
This is correct, but there's more to it than that - it's just nobody really wants to admit it.
In
Jules Witcover's "Marathon," a massive book that covers Carter winning the 1976 election, he lays out the Carter plan to get the nomination and their press strategy long before it really got going. One thing they decided early on was the reality that "there exists an Eastern liberal news establishment which has tremendous influence in this country all out of proportion to its actual audience" (p 114). But their advantage was that a number of these people were BORN IN THE SOUTH and probably (subconsciously) would love to see the South move beyond George Wallace (who, yes, ran in 1976).
The reality nobody likes to hear is that press coverage is - at least WAS - often determined by such superficial things as whether they liked the accommodations on the plane or at the hotel, whether the candidate was nice to them personally, if they had a pet issue, and other things that in most cases have nothing to do with who should be President.
I've used this example previously but in 1984, the news media told us that even though he LOST 7 of 9 contests (six of them to Gary Hart, Hawaii to uncommitted), two things happened: 1) his spin patrol had framed the narrative to the networks that the two IMPORTANT contests were Alabama and Georgia, which Mondale won; 2) the news media went with it uncritically, largely because (wait for it) they didn't care much for Gary Hart going back to his days as McGovern's adviser.
Tom Brokaw got the ball rolling with, "Walter Mondale, alive and well tonight in his race for the Democratic presidential nomination, thanking, as he put it, his friends in the South. And well he might, because they have kept him in this race tonight." Then when going over the results showing Mondale got clobbered - indeed, his own advisers have said since then if he'd lost Alabama, he'd have had to withdraw, that's how close it was - Brokaw told the whole country that Hart won these contests "as expected", diminishing it.
Roger Mudd, helping Brokaw, was even worse. When Hart was pointing out what I've just pointed out here, that basically he had bombed Mondale all across America, Mudd said: "But you didn’t win in Georgia and you didn’t win in Alabama, so really all you won was Florida, which isn’t a true southern state.
So you’re really not a national candidate yet, are you?"
Can you imagine the level of brainwashing and lobotomy necessary to even try something like that?
But NBC got away with it.
Peter Jennings was not nearly so entranced, but he wasn't much better:
I was just thinking that if you’d arrived in this country tonight from outer space, you would have thought Hart was the big winner. Two states, two biggest states, Massachusetts and Florida.
But because Walter Mondale set so many of the expectations for the South tonight, it looks, as I think we’re pretty well describing it, as pretty much of a standoff."
Let me translate what Jennings just said: "Most of us don't know Hart, we've known Mondale since 1964, and he told us this was what was necessary for him to be successful. And we're going with it even though anyone with a brain can look at this and see who is the actual national candidate."
Of course, we're now in the Internet age so there's less excuse for whether one knows a person's positions. But they know less. Ten years ago I made a reference to a guy in his early 30s about Johnny Carson and after I finished he said, "Who's Johnny Carson?"
Funny.
I didn't have You Tube in 1978, but I know who Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, Soupy Sales, Jack Paar, Jackie Gleason, and Steve Allen were without even having seen one second of their shows.
