How Counter-Narratives Emerge

[Dill]

(07-13-2017, 10:18 PM)michaelsean Wrote: How far do we get to go back?  Vietnam saw 60,000 Americans killed and I don't know how many Vietnamese. A million?  Since it happened in my lifetime I'm going to go ahead and count it. Republicans get 9 more Iraqs before they catch up.

Thanks for the question, Michael. It will help clarify my intent in starting this thread.

Remember that I want to construct an analytic framework in which it becomes possible to do more than just trade anecdotes about which party is "worse."

The topic is news "counter-narratives"--is there something new and different about the way these are constructed and deployed by the current White House and Fox?  I am exploring the possibility that we've come to a point where the deployment of "whatabouts" and false equivalences is designed and systematic, and I am curious about what changes in the mediascape have allowed this strategy to be effective--e.g., delegitimation of the MSM.

If the White House makes a false equivalence between Vietnam and some Trump scandal, then we certainly could go back to Vietnam--or the Civil War. 

I mentioned Iraq in juxtaposition to Benghazi because of the amazing difference in outrage produced by each.  This difference is not to be explained by the events themselves.  The magnitude of consequences for the US--and the Middle East--is massively greater in the case of Iraq. Bush and Cheney, who actually planned and were most directly responsible for the Iraq debacle, did not go unscathed. There was an investigation of where intel went wrong and another into the failure to find WMDs. Both politicians lost credibility and support, and faced heavy criticism from the "liberal press"--appropriately, I think. In contrast, in the Right Wing media, responsibility for Benghazi was so directly connected to Hillary that Hannity was campaigning for her to meet the families of the deceased and apologize to them personally. Imagine--7 investigations into Benghazi, including the longest in Congressional history. In the course of the last, one it was discovered Hillary had a private server. That more than anything may have lost her the election.

Comparisons to the Mayaguez incident and the Bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut might have been more effective. The point of such comparisons would not be to throw up more bad decisions by Republicans (difficult judgment calls each, just like Carter's attempt to rescue the Iran hostages), but to highlight the difference in media treatment. Back then it would have been unthinkable to demand Ford or Reagan apologize personally to family members.

What has changed since those days?