Polluted Airwaves

I thought it was very strange that I saw not one media report on Scaife's NewsMax repackage of The Swift Boat Liars report. This ran as a 30 minute infomercial on PAX ABC/Family Network stations right before the Presidential election.

What a thing to show on TV. Especially on family channels. 30 minutes of unrestrained Republican hatemongers, often wearing their old military uniforms, calling John Kerry a traitor who lengthened the war and promoted the torture of American POWs.

I suppose it is that none of the liberal media normally watch this network with its strong rural family Christian viewership that prevented this from being noticed or commented on.

The infomercial appeared to be a condensed version of the program Sinclair Network was going to air distilled to 30 minutes of hate speech. Every 5-10 minutes a written pitch superimposed to buy the video for $5 made it an infomercial. Is this the way around campaign watchdogs, disguise 30 minutes of propaganda as an infomercial? Can liberals start buying up infomercial time and attack GOP public officials claiming it is to sell videos?

Scaife has always been a pioneer in vicious attacks. He spent tens of millions of dollars investigating Clinton and promoting wild charges hoping something would shake loose. Eventually something did.

Maybe this time he took a clue from the Perot's campaign 30 minute ad blocks.

Running infomercials directly at a target audience on a media the metropolitan press doesn't see - brilliant. No wonder there was the massive rural voter rejection of Kerry. Kerry was branded a traitor and no one in the media or his campaign noticed. Rural people and families and Christian noticed. Kerry had a record low percentage of the rural county vote.

This was right before the 2004 election, over a year ago, but it still bugs me.

Tags: Scaife, NewsMax, infomercial, political ads, hate speech, Rove, 2004, campaign