from www.margieburns.comElection year 2004 is a year of considerable challenge for the administration. Inside the administration, the whole Iraq story is unraveling even more decisively than it has unraveled in public, and the White House and the Office of the Vice President must fend off challenges including investigation and oversight. Meanwhile, the ‘antiwar movement,’ as the corporate media outlets call it, is making itself felt. Awareness of what actually led to the Iraq war spreads through a wider spectrum of the public. From the administration, public statements in support of the troops and behind-the-scenes manipulation continue in tandem.
What the administration achieves depends on the help of large media outlets. The political challenge posed by former Vermont Governor Howard Dean is demolished by the fictional ‘Dean scream,’ where manipulated sound footage runs several hundred times on CNN to create a false impression about the Democratic front-runner. This false impression is instantly seized on by Bob Schieffer at CBS, by the Washington Post, and other prominent journalistic outlets, and instantly hardens into conventional wisdom.
