Promoting New(t)speak

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Promoting New(t)speak

In a pivotal 1996 memo from GOPAC, a Republican non- profit, to Republican politicians and activists distributed by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, the speaker and his colleagues made it clear that the future of the GOP wasn’t going to be in meeting the needs of average Americans; instead, they suggested, it was in talking in a way that would cause people to think the GOP was.45

Never again would they blunder into clear and blunt language about their true goals, as David Koch had so disastrously done in 1980.

Titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” the memo declared, “We believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.”46

The list, the memo said, was “prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible.”

There were two parts: “Optimistic Positive Governing words and phrases . . .” and “Contrasting words to help you clearly define the policies and record of your opponent and the Democratic party.”

When discussing tax cuts or deregulation of polluting industries or cutting backdoor deals for big banks, Republican politicians should use words like candid, common sense, crusade, dream, duty, family, freedom, liberty, opportunity, pristine, prosperity, reform, strength, tough, truth, and vision (this is only a partial list).

When describing Democratic plans to extend unemployment insurance or expand unionization or build out America’s infrastructure, and especially for issues like abortion, guns, gays, or God, there was a very different word list. It included “powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party”: abuse, betray, bizarre, bosses, bureaucracy, corrupt, decay, disgrace, greed, hypocrisy, incompetent, liberal, pathetic, permissive, radical, red tape, self-serving, shame, sick, taxes, traitors, waste, and the two worst: unionized and welfare (again, among other words).

Rush Limbaugh and a pack of well-funded competitors were rising fast with a little help from their friends, amplifying Newt’s GOPAC word list.

Ken Vogel and Mackenzie Weinger reported in Politico in 2014 that “conservative groups spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for involved advertising relationships known as sponsorships with a handful of influential talkers including [Glenn] Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh between the first talk radio deals in 2008 and the end of 2012. Since then, the sponsorship deals have grown more lucrative.”47 Most of the money was laundered (my word, not theirs) through groups like the Heritage Foundation.

“Heritage began sponsoring Hannity in 2008 and paid $1.3 million in 2011 to a broker to arrange and fund the deal, according to the group’s IRS filings,” Vogel and Weinger wrote. “The Koch brothers–backed Americans for Prosperity paid at least $757,000” primarily to sponsor Mark Levin’s radio show, and Rush Limbaugh was “paid more than $2 million in some years and more than $9.5 million overall.”

The billionaires know how to take good care of the people broadcasting their worldview virtually 24/7 in every city in America of any consequence. Nothing even close—nothing at all, frankly—existed or exists on the left side of the radio dial. Meanwhile, billionaire Rupert Murdoch brought to the United States the same libertarian worldview he’d first inflicted on Australia and then Great Britain.

Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia, wrote about Murdoch’s awesome influence over that country in a blunt article for the Sydney Morning Herald in August 2018 titled “Cancer Eating the Heart of Australian Democracy.”48 Murdoch himself, Rudd wrote, was “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy. Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.” He pointed out that “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media.”

“In Britain,” Rudd wrote, “Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Murdoch’s positions weren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd suggested. They were simply pro–white rich people. “In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.”

In fact, while liberals were scrambling to raise and then exhaust around $17 million over half a decade to put Air America on 54 radio stations nationwide (conservative talk is on more than 1,000), Murdoch apparently didn’t think twice about losing nearly $100 million a year in the first few years of Fox News, according to Brit Hume. In a 1999 interview with PBS, Hume said that the channel, launched in 1996, was still in a position where it “loses money. It doesn’t lose nearly as much as it did at first, and it’s—well, it’s hit all its projections in terms of, you know, turning a profit, but it’s—it will lose money now, and we expect for a couple more years. I think it’s losing about $80 million to $90 million a year.”49

But if Murdoch could help get Republican politicians elected so that he could have billions of dollars in tax cuts and deregulation that would let him expand his empire in ways previously illegal in the United States, then spending a few hundred million to launch a nationwide propaganda operation was chump change. Eventually, it even turned into a cash cow, as had so many of his other media purchases in the US, UK, and Australia.

And if Gingrich’s word list sounds familiar, it’s because it lives on, in daily rants across America from Fox News to hundreds of right-wing talk hosts on radio stations owned by multibillion-dollar corporations.