When Republicans Attack

The ad “McCain: Fact Check” uses a number of propaganda techniques in its brief 31 seconds:

• Imagery
• Positive / negative words
• Poisoning the well
• Misrepresentation

Imagery: The video paints the Obama camp as vicious predators via footage of a hungry pack of wolves (scavenging for dirt on Sarah Palin). Additionally, three photos of Obama (in black and white) convey anger and despair. In color photos (taken with the camera looking up at their faces), Palin and McCain smile and look determined.

Negative Words: “attacks”; “false”; “misleading”; “dig dirt”; “drops in the polls”; “try to destroy [Governor Palin]: [Obama's Politics of Hope are] “empty words.” Obama is referred to by his last name; Palin is called “Governor Palin.”

Poisoning the Well: The McCain ad uses this powerful logical fallacy not only to predict future bad actions by Obama but to associate such behavior with desperation: “As Obama drops in the polls, he’ll try to destroy her.”

Misrepresentation: The video associates the spoken statement “The attacks on Governor Palin have been called false … misleading” with an image (superimposed over the picture of a grimacing Obama) of the FactCheck.org logo and the phrase “completely false”…”misleading” 9/8/08.

McCain ad misrepresentation

But as FactCheck.org itself points out in its September 10 posting “McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding,” FactCheck used the phrases “completely false” and “misleading” to refer to anonymous Internet postings, not to any statement by Obama: “We have no evidence that any of the claims we found to be false came from the Obama campaign.” FactCheck also notes that the McCain ad distorts its quote from The Wall Street Journal (the Journal did not use the phrase “dig dirt” to characterize the mission of a team of lawyers Obama allegedly sent to Alaska (a mission that Obama’s campaign say did not happen).

A favorite Republican trick is to associate positively-charged words with the conservative cause and negative terms with the opposition.

Newt Gingrich wrote an influential manual, Language, A Key Mechanism of Control, providing a list of “positive governing words” such as “citizen,” “peace,” and “truth,” and an opposing list of negative terms like “corruption,” “hypocrisy,” and “radical” for characterizing opponents.

Background and lists of words, courtesy of The Propaganda Critic.

The following Swift Boat Veterans ad (courtesy of YouTube) uses both types of terms masterfully in their attack on Presidential candidate John Kerry.

Negative terms: lying / lied / not honest (6 times); lacks the capacity to lead; could not count on; no war hero; betrayed (twice); dishonored; cannot be trusted.

Positive terms (used to characterize veterans in video): served (4 times); truth.

Note how the ad progresses from “not honest” to “lied” to unheroic to “betrayed / dishonored” and finally back to “cannot be trusted.” Such a strategy was designed to shift attention away from Bush’s lack of combat experience toward a debate over the trustworthiness of Kerry and an unsupported characterization of his service.