EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE THIS – regardless of how you feel about health care reform.
Frank Luntz is a GOP strategist. His job is essentially to help the Republican party use the media to coerce/persuade/convince/etc. people to be on their side (a.k.a., public relations strategist, propagandist, strategist, etc.). He put out this instruction on how Republican leaders and politicians should go about “Stopping the Washington Takeover of Health Care.”
Luntz took polls done on the American people and crafted this memo to help his people to say EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR and to push your buttons on the issues you fear the most. He says things like “Use this to your advantage” and one of my favorites:
They don’t want to hear that you’re opposed to government healthcare because it’s too expensive (any help from the government to lower costs will be embraced) or because it’s anti-competitive (they don’t know about or care about current limits to competition). But they are deathly afraid that a government
takeover will lower their quality of care – so they are extremely receptive to the anti-Washington approach. It’s not an economic issue. It’s a bureaucratic issue.
It’s public relations at its worst, frankly, and quite honestly…it disgusts me.
It reads like call center script manual — it’s an, “If they say this, then respond with this” type of thing. And the funny part? Since this memo came out, the words and phrases documented in his memo have skyrocketed in frequency by politicians as well as radio commentators such as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Dave Ramsey, etc.
So in case you didn’t catch it before, here is the memo. Now THAT…THAT is scary stuff.
Further info:
Frank I. Luntz (born February 23, 1962) is an American conservative Republican political consultant and pollster.[1] His most recent work has been with the Fox News Channel running focus groups after presidential debates. Luntz’s specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”[2] Luntz formed The Luntz Research Companies in 1992, and maintains an office in Alexandria, Virginia. (Wikipedia)
Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. (Wikipedia)
Lauren