Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Keeping Up With The Smears

I am blessed to be in the middle of the political communications war this election season. I kind of think of it as the perfect storm of misinformation and I'm George Clooney as the waves converge. It's not just the Democrat/Republican war to which I've been privy, but also the Hillary/Obama/McCain/Ron Paul slinging.

My family is longtime Republican supporters. I get all the anti-Hillary and anti-Obama chain emails. Like this relatively mild one:


Or this one.


And then, this one.


And I was part of Ron Paul's grassroots organization here in Georgia, so am flooded with anti-neocon/pro-constitutional sentiment (what amounts to a great deal of bashing the current Republican status quo). Which is more in line with my own thinking, but even there, the smears pull for the fences and the most common sense output has typos.


Plus the McCain/Republican media machine has started cranking up, so there's even more 'message' with which to contend.

And I live in probably one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the country, with an email list for the community that is constantly filled with postings for anti-war rallies, Peak Oil summits, alternative religion/medicine/lifestyle solutions, and extensive counterculture views. Oh, and I subscribe to the New York Times.

So you could say I'm either incredibly informed or incredibly mis-informed. Simultaneously.

I rely upon a cadre of tools to try to make sense out of the confluence of smears and jeers in my daily swim through the media.

This from the Obama camp:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fightthesmearshome/

There's always Snopes.com.

John Stewart and Colbert Report are high on my list. If you don't laugh, you'll cry.

Ron Paul's site is a great resource for the issues.

Ross Perot just launched a new charts site that has some fascinating perspectives.

With all of this perfect storm media, I continue to hope we don't all wind up on the bottom of the ocean, like poor George Clooney.

No comments: