Reply #7: They do it because it gives the appearance of public opinion [View All]

[Mabus]

and because they can.

Excerpts from David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy

Two years later, testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee revealed that Nixon special counsel Charles Colson took $8,000 from Nixon's reelection committee to purchase copies of The News Twisters.6 Among a long list of dirty tricks, Colson had been" charged with planting phony letters to the editor in newspapers to enhance Nixon's image and with entertaining a plot to bomb the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank the Nixonites considered a symbol of the liberal establishment.7 During Watergate, Colson was designated to attack news accounts as "a fan-tasy, a work of fiction," and he ordered up a "butcher piece" on the Washington Post staff.8

After Nixon's death in 1994, Colson told the story of The News Twisters to Newsweek: " called me into his office on another occasion and asked me if I had read Edith Efron's book about biased network news cov- erage. I had. I had also concluded that it was a book destined for obscurity. Nixon then ordered me to get it on the best-seller list. I was used to cryp- tic instructions, but never one quite like this. After finding the particular stores that the New York Times and others regularly checked to determine which books were selling, I enlisted the assistance of some Nixon support- ers in New York. We literally bought out the stores."9 When Nixon aide E. Howard Hunt quit the White House during the Watergate scandal, he left behind several cartons of The News Twisters.10 (p. 19 of Brock's book)

Footnotes for the excerpt:
6. John M. Crewdson, New York Times, August 19,1974,16.
7. Elizabeth Mehren, "'Insanity' in Nixon's White House," Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2003.
8. Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997),476-477. 9. "Remembrances," Newsweek, May 2, 1994, 24.
10. Crewdson, op. cit.

The reason they buy the books off the racks is to give the appearance that people are actually buying certain books. It is part of the marketing and legitimizing of the work. This works on several levels. First, it gets the book noticed by the general public. People notice which books are on the list and sometimes it piques their interest enough to buy it. Plus, when someone like Coulter gets on the NYT best seller list is becomes a selling point and gives Fox News a reason to give interview time to the author, thereby, "legitimizing the book" and what it says. The next step is to get the fact that the book has made the list on the cover of the book and on displays at the various book signings.

Finally, the biggest thing it does is cast doubt on the news shows. After all, all these people are buying this book, so what the author says must have some validity, right? (wink, wink) This brings up the old canard about "liberal media bias". If the media interviews the author then the left screams they shouldn't because, like in the case of Coulter, the author is nuts and there is little to substantiate the claims and assertions she makes. On the other hand, if the media doesn't interview the author then they can be accused by the right of surpressing the truth, or at least the version they want to believe is true.