- Dummy
up. If it's not reported, if it's not
news, it didn't happen.
- Wax indignant. This is also known as
the "How dare you?" gambit.
- Characterize the charges as "rumors"
or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in
spite of the news blackout, the public
is still able to learn about the
suspicious facts, it can only be through
"rumors." (If they tend to believe the
"rumors" it must be because they are
simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")
- Knock down straw men. Deal only with
the weakest aspects of the weakest
charges. Even better, create your own
straw men. Make up wild rumors (or plant
false stories) and give them lead play
when you appear to debunk all the
charges, real and fanciful alike.
- Call the skeptics names like
"conspiracy theorist," "nutcase,"
"ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and, of
course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to
use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives
when characterizing their charges and
defending the "more reasonable"
government and its defenders. You must
then carefully avoid fair and open
debate with any of the people you have
thus maligned. For insurance, set up
your own "skeptics" to shoot down.
- Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize
the critics by suggesting strongly that
they are not really interested in the
truth but are simply pursuing a partisan
political agenda or are out to make
money (compared to over-compensated
adherents to the government line who,
presumably, are not).
- Invoke authority. Here the controlled
press and the sham opposition can be
very useful.
- Dismiss the charges as "old news."
- Come
half-clean. This is also known
as "confession and avoidance" or "taking
the limited hangout route." This way,
you create the impression of candor and
honesty while you admit only to
relatively harmless, less-than-criminal
"mistakes." This stratagem often
requires the embrace of a fall-back
position quite different from the one
originally taken. With effective damage
control, the fall-back position need
only be peddled by stooge skeptics to
carefully limited markets.
- Characterize the crimes as impossibly
complex and the truth as ultimately
unknowable.
- Reason backward, using the deductive
method with a vengeance. With thoroughly
rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence
is irrelevant. E.g. We have a completely
free press. If evidence exists that the
Vince Foster "suicide" note was forged,
they would have reported it. They
haven't reported it so there is no such
evidence. Another variation on this
theme involves the likelihood of a
conspiracy leaker and a press who would
report the leak.
- Require the skeptics to solve the
crime completely. E.g. If Foster was
murdered, who did it and why?
- Change the subject. This technique
includes creating and/or publicizing
distractions.
- Lightly
report incriminating facts, and then
make nothing of them. This is
sometimes referred to as "bump and run"
reporting.
- Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite
way of doing this is to attribute the
"facts" furnished the public to a
plausible-sounding, but anonymous,
source.
- Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5,
have
your own stooges "expose" scandals and
champion popular causes. Their
job is to pre-empt real opponents and to
play 99-yard football. A variation is to
pay rich people for the job who will
pretend to spend their own money.
- Flood
the Internet with agents. This
is the answer to the question, "What
could possibly motivate a person to
spend hour upon hour on Internet news
groups defending the government and/or
the press and harassing genuine
critics?" Don t the authorities have
defenders enough in all the newspapers,
magazines, radio, and television? One
would think refusing to print critical
letters and screening out serious
callers or dumping them from radio talk
shows would be control enough, but,
obviously, it is not.
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