{"id":15854,"date":"2009-11-18T10:35:29","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T15:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=15854"},"modified":"2012-09-18T23:50:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-19T04:50:15","slug":"guest-post-dithering-and-talking-points","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/11\/18\/guest-post-dithering-and-talking-points\/","title":{"rendered":"Dithering and Talking Points"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nThe Daily Show<\/em> calls itself \u201ca fake news show,\u201d but it often does what the \u201creal\u201d news shows won\u2019t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as \u201cspontaneous and unrehearsed\u201d (as the opening of Meet the Press<\/em> used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. The Daily Show<\/em> will give a quick montage of clips in which different people on different shows all use the same unusual word or phrase.<\/p>\n

Last night it was \u201cdithering.\u201d A series of right-wingers, culminating in Dick Cheney, all accuse President Obama of \u201cdithering\u201d on Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Slide to 3:37:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

It was just like the old days, when The Daily Show<\/em> would string together clips from Bush Administration figures and right-wing commentators all using the same key words. But then, the statements all came on the same day, so the central direction was obvious. (I mean, it was obvious to Daily Show<\/em> viewers, not to viewers of \u201creal\u201d news programs.)<\/p>\n

The popularity of dithering may be more a case of contagion than planning. Note the dates of the O\u2019Reilly and Cheney clips, more than two weeks apart.<\/p>\n

Dithering is not a frequently used word. Lexis-Nexis shows only 27 instances in TV news transcripts for the first nine months of the year. The first use in connection with Afghanistan comes on September 24 \u2013 on Australian ABC, but the speaker was from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. So it\u2019s likely that dithering represented one idea of how to attack Obama. That idea took hold.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the next month, dithering begins to reverberate. Republican senators use it in hearings in early October, TV news people bounce it back, and right-wing commentators start yodeling it loudly.<\/p>\n

They are changing the rationale for why we are in Afghanistan. What\u2019s really going on here is a dither, a big dither, indecisiveness. (William Bennett on CNN, Oct. 18)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And finally the Cheney quote on Oct. 21 that is echoed in every news story about that speech.<\/p>\n

The White House must stop dithering while America\u2019s forces are in danger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite possibly, Cheney\u2019s speech was written by someone at the American Enterprise Institute or someone else in that neo-con circle. Still, I don\u2019t see the dithering as a matter of \u201ctalking points\u201d distributed by the RNC. Instead, it\u2019s an example of what I mentioned in another<\/a> post \u2013 a word (dithering<\/em>, issues<\/em>) that spreads because it just sounds \u201cright,\u201d at least to certain people.<\/p>\n

I expect that the dithering life cycle will be mayfly brief. Issues <\/em>to mean problems <\/em>was slower to catch on, and it may hang around for a good while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Daily Show calls itself \u201ca fake news show,\u201d but it often does what the \u201creal\u201d news shows won\u2019t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as \u201cspontaneous and unrehearsed\u201d (as the opening of Meet the Press used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,129,85,309],"class_list":["post-15854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-media","tag-politics","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15854"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51174,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15854\/revisions\/51174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}