The Bush Propaganda Office is ready for action. An article in today’s Washington Post details the way the administration will manipulate the media to saturate coverage with the White House viewpoint, timed for the “news cycles” created by various television dayparts.
Just as in a political campaign, the Bush administration wants its version of each day’s events to be first and foremost, as it seeks to press preferred story lines.
The close attention to its war message mirrors the discipline the Bush team brought to his election campaign and to the passage of his domestic political agenda, especially the securing of a $1.35 trillion tax cut from Congress. Such a comprehensive communications strategy for a war, however, is unprecedented in the modern White House.
Once the war starts, the administration plans to fill every information void in the 24-hour worldwide news cycle, leaving little to chance or interpretation.
At dawn, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer will brief the television networks and the wire services in a conference call before the morning news programs. A conference call will follow among Fleischer, Bush communications director Dan Bartlett and White House Office of Global Communications Director Tucker Eskew, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, Defense Department spokeswoman Victoria Clarke and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s senior spokesman, Alastair Campbell. During the call, they will set out thematic story lines for the day and deal with pending problems.
An afternoon briefing at Central Command headquarters in Qatar will be held most days, timed to hit the news at noon in the United States. Supper-time television news in the United States and late broadcasts in Europe will be fed by the Pentagon’s afternoon briefing in Washington, where military officials will utilize the video images from targeted bombs that all agree worked well in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in the Afghan campaign.
It sounds like preproduction meetings for a big television variety show. “Bush and Friends, brought to you live from Iraq… Qatar… The Pentagon… The White House! Now from Washington, here’s your host, Ari Fleischer!”
