February 13, 2006

Six Degrees of Propaganda

Today we examine Brit Hume's most recent Grapevine segment (Friday, Feb 10) and find that it's even more tawdry than your typical Hume entry. Miffed by a Dove Soap / Girlscouts campaign to make girls feel better about themselves, Hume takes on the Campaign For Real Beauty writing:

As part of a national campaign to promote self-esteem among young girls, the makers of Dove soap have provided teens with information on everything from politics to sex, but some of the content may raise

The Campaign for Real Beauty Web site suggests that readers report offensive ads and messages to media watchdogs such as Media Watch and Adbusters. But those organizations' Web sites contain links to articles attacking the Bush administration, offers for online dating sites specifically aimed at liberal Democrats and numerous references to pornography. One online forum even contains solicitation for free kiddie porn.

Ceratinly it's an odd non-sequitor that follows the word "but" in that second paragraph. So what if those organization contain links to articles critical of the Bush administration? I'm not sure how that is supposed to undermine the Campaign for Real Beauty. Nor does Hume attempt, in any way, to justify the apparent negative implication of the disjunction. Apparently, in Hume's world, it's enough to link to a webiste that itself links to criticisms of the Bush Amdinistration to render your campaign suspect.

More dishonest are the warnings that follow. Apparently these webistes also feature: "offers for online dating sites specifically aimed at liberal Democrats" (Watch out, parents, if your daughter visits one of those sites she might start dating a... gasp... liberal Democrat!) "and numerous references to pornography" (While I couldn't find any of these "numerous refernces to pornography when I followed the links in question, it's worth noting that Hume's Grapevine segment itself contains "numerous references ot pronography"). Most odious, of course, is Brit Hume's claim that "One online forum even contains solicitation for free kiddie porn." What online forum? When? Was it a paid advertisement, or mere spam that got through a filter on an otherwise unmoderated discussion forum? Hume doesn't say. I ran a blog search to see if I could track down what it was Hume was referring to, but all I could find were legions of blogs praising the Campaign for Real Beauty and a recent "Superbowl" commercial sponsored by Dove.

In the end, what Hume has done here is implement one of the simplest and most dishonest tricks in the dirty political pool playbook. You take an organization's website and follow the links, then follow the links from the webistes it links to, and so on and so forth until you reach an unsavory webiste. You play "six degrees of internet separation" and announce that your political opponent's website links to a website that itself links to a website that links to a website that includes a "solicitation for kiddie porn." The fact that Brit Hume had to fall back on a link on an unnamed "online forum" shows just how desperate the Fox News anchor is to dig up some dirt on the campaign. After all, online forums are notoriously difficult to regulate, and a popular tactic of internet spammers is to radomly post advertisements in umoderated online forums to drive up web traffic.

Is this journalism?

Update: I've found what I think is Hume's Source for this piece. It appears to be this editorial by a right-wing columnist in the conservative PittsburgLive website. The offending web forum appears to have been on Adbusters. The offensive post is no longer available, but from the description was clearly a spam message that has been deleted by forum moderators. Of course, you'd never know that by reading "The Grapevine" As for the "numerous references to pornography," they are from a Yes Magazine interview with Chris Hedges titled Love and Resistance in Wartime. This is what Hedges says:

In a wartime society, the moral order is flipped upside down; prostitution, rape, and abuse all rise as the levels of violence rises. That happened in every conflict I was in. In Serbia, for instance, as the violence proliferated you also had a proliferation of pornography and snuff films. It always goes hand in hand, because what you are destroying is the humanity of the other; you are turning the other into an object, which is precisely what torture or pornography does.

Not exactly the promotion of pornography that Brit Hume seems to be implying in his segment.