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6 | Having to Explain Blowback on the Tick-Tock
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★ 173 6 Having to Explain Blowback on the Tick-Tock The Media and Scandals Spend time with reporters at a Washington bar and you’ll hear references to tick-tocks, hit pieces, and other journalistic terms. The people they cover in the White House, Congress , and in campaigns have their own trade terms in pushing their agenda, including pushing back against the reporters: walk back and gotcha journalism, to name a couple. Knowing that the media won’t pliantly take a campaign’s vocabulary , operatives go to great lengths to find terms likely to get around the press filter. “The way you deal with the media in messaging is to craft language that’s easy to repeat,” said David Rosen, founder of the consulting firm First Person Politics, in Washington, D.C. “Everything from ‘don’t cut and run’ to ‘tax relief ’ rather than ‘tax cut.’” Rosen recalls coining the phrase “Don’t double down on trickle down” in 2011 while working at liberal interest group Media Matters. “That memo was the first time that device appeared anywhere on the Internet.Then it went silent for about a year.Then all of a sudden Bill Clinton was saying it, President Obama was saying it.” The proliferation of scandal coverage is clear from the mushrooming list of “gates” that have joined the political lexicon in recent years, and are covered in this chapter. Any list of gates is an impressive compendium of hype and folly, newsprint and book deals, litigation and vexation.The term has traveled far, precisely because of the press’s preference for scandal. It has gone from Watergate, named for the site of a botched attempt by President Richard Nixon to bug his Democratic rivals, to Nipplegate, the name given Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” 174 ★ Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs & Washington hanDshakes during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. A decade later came Bridgegate, over efforts by staffers for New Jersey governor Chris Christie to cause a traffic jam in Fort Lee as a measure of political payback against local Democratic officials. This specific sort of scandal packaging may be one of American politics’ chief exports. Take a cursory glance at how far the gate name has penetrated the foreign press. Recently, we’ve seen the international scandals of Climategate, Cablegate (over Wikileaks), and Dopegate (over Lance Armstrong) and well as highly country-specific gates. The UK gave us Murdochgate and Bigotgate; Canada, NAFTAgate and Robogate; from Ireland, Brothelgate; and India gave us Slapgate and Porngate. Blowback: A term that has migrated from the spy world, where it was coined in the 1950s to represent unpleasant and unexpected surprises resulting from covert operations (such as the CiA helping international rebels who later turn out to be terrorists). In politics it means any unwanted backlash or harsh criticism. Like other national-security-derived terms, we would posit that it’s common because it sounds cool. ★ After Vice President Joe Biden blurted out his support of gay marriage before President Barack Obama could do so in 2012, Biden told Rolling Stone: “I got blowback from everybody but the president. I walked in that Monday, he had a big grin on his face, he put his arms around me and said, ‘Well, Joe, God love you, you say what you think.’”1 And when Fox News asked Kid Rock if he had gotten any criticism for supporting Mitt Romney that same year, the rebel rock star laughed. “Of course there’s blowback,” he said. “I’m like the only righty in the lefty industry.”2 The Hotline, an online publication that was once an indispensable source for political information, used to call its readerresponse section “Blowback.” Broderism: See Overton window, chapter 2. Committing candor: To speak the unvarnished truth, usually inadvertently, and thus spark a controversy. [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:51 GMT) ★ 175 The Media and ScandalS ★ When Army General Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2003 that it would take “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” to stabilize Iraq, it outraged Bush administration officials, who believed the job could be done with far fewer troops. Shinseki, former president Bill Clinton observed later, “committed candor.”3 And when several 2012 candidates for various offices refused to provide direct answers to questions on tough issues, the Associated Press’s Henry C. Jackson wrote that the reason was “the fear of committing candor that’s both damaging and hard to...