great advice for handling the political media, from Warren Kinsella

[highplainsdem]

Kinsella is sort of a Canadian version of James Carville, and he has a lot of tips for handling the media in the text of a speech on his website, at

http://www.warrenkinsella.com/words_speeches_ol.htm

He's talking about Canadian politics, which I'm not at all familiar with, but you can skim past that to the basic advice (and his writing style makes this speech a great read, too).

He offers two main points on politics -- defining your own people and re-defining your opponents, and managing the dialogue -- and twelve points specifically about the media, since that two-point process isn't easy, and maybe not even possible, if you have the problem Kinsella said his Liberal party had with the media:

Not just that they simply disliked us. No, they really, really, really hated us, to reverse Sally Fields famous words. There were a lot of reasons for this, all of which are too boring to recount here.

Let's just say that being hated by the media is not the end of the world if (a) you remember that most of the public hates the media right back and (b) you have a strategy for dealing with it.

So let me give you my strategy for dealing with the political media.

Political journalists - and I write this as someone who has been one, and as someone who has even taught unsuspecting youngsters how to be one - are duplicitous, lazy, amoral con men. They are cynical and without a soul, every one of them. If Jesus Christ Himself was one of their confidential sources, they would burn Him in a New York minute, just to get the scoop on His resurrection.

So he offers 12 tips, which I can't copy here because of the limits on quoted material. But they're all worth reading, and his writing is much more entertaining than any paraphrase could be.

I ran across this speech yesterday while doing a Google search for something to quote on the old KISS rule for politics (Keep It Simple, Stupid) -- Kinsella's speech turned up because he refers to Carville's variation of that rule for Clinton's 1992 campaign. I thought it was especially relevant now after all the dismay yesterday when the ANSWER rally splintered the focus of an anti-war protest. But Kinsella has so much more good advice there on handling the media that I thought his entire speech was worth mentioning here.

[blogslut]

1. My Dad was a newspaperman

I once asked him: "Do they write this slanted stuff on purpose?"

He said, "Yes".

It's amazing how a writer can bend a story with the choice of a word or a cleverly edited quote. Thank Bob I learned long ago how to read between the lines.