Revisiting the Deep Throat/Watergate stuff has brought out some interesting but very relevant lessons for outing a story against a powerful administration.
Killing/spinning a story is perfected to the point that only someone that studies mass media can pick out what's happening. Left activists are no exception to this rule, and are as constantly duped by spin as the supposedly less savvy public. Tactics have been enumerated in a number of books and essays, and I won't go in depth here, but some major ones include media blackout, releasing a smaller diversionary scandal, discrediting sources, "The big lie", flat denial. With a really big story it's easiest often to just ignore it and let the crazy wingnuts and conspiracy theorists do their work (kind of automatically discrediting an otherwise relevant story). PR and Damage Control works great for fending off a single story.
Deep Throat chose to release his story piecemeal, with fragmented evidence.
It's easy to kill a big story, no matter how damning it is. It is next to impossible, however to deal with a trickle of stories, each provided a different component to a broader picture. The govt/corp that you are opposing will be doing damage control on one, maybe two stories... But to spin a against a whole slew of fragmented evidence requires an amazing consistency and story telling capability, which is hard for even the best con men.
As a sidenote, the bush administration has perfected one particuarly form of spin: Paint any story that goes against you as generated by ideologically driven enemies who will spin a story to get them out of office. If this is true 5% of the time, all you have to do is selectively pick your strawmen that you will counter.
Deep Throat had 2 extra advantages in this case: 1) he was "close to the source" - being at the FBI, his own internal spin was much less and more sober than an outside political enemy would be. 2) He was anonymous. Outside of preventing publicity about your personal life, (it doesnt do much to prevent things like assasination - Nixon named the leak - and most inside orgs will be able to piece together where it is coming from), it also prevents this bush style from of political discreditting.
Posted by Da Mystik Homeboy at June 4, 2005 03:02 PM