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Wayne called Mikhi into his office the next day. “I’ve booked you for an interview with Tylon Talon at the Raposa News service next week. We need to do some work before then.”
“Raposa News? Never heard of it.”
“That’s right. I want you to get your feet wet with someone most people haven’t heard of. If you do well, the Elders can always promote clips of it through our AI spoofer. If you bomb, we can simply make it ‘die’. If you do very well, we’ll get you on something a little more popular. Creating a media campaign isn’t just about accessibility, it’s also about tempo. I want to build you up slowly so the lame-stream boys and girls really want you on their show. That will give me more leverage to negotiate the terms of the interview. You don’t want to be someone that they can crush like a steamroller or simply cut off the feed if things don’t go the way they want.”
“Oh. OK. What’s the prep work?”
“I’ve brought in some people to run you through a fake interview so I can coach you about how to answer questions. We’re also going to teach you some ‘self-defence’ techniques that will allow you to fight back if the interview turns into a brawl.”
“The Raposa News network is an ‘up-and-comer’ in the conservative media landscape and Tylon Talon will see this interview as a way of ‘getting noticed’. To that end, he’ll probably go ‘flat out’ to score a direct hit on you. He knows that he’s got a lot more to gain than to lose, so he’s going to take real risks. He’ll have the support of his news director and production staff because both they and the channel are in the same boat. If they can get noticed by the conservative establishment they have an opportunity to get on board the ‘wingnut welfare’ gravy train---and they want that.”
“What’s ‘wingnut welfare’?”
“When a pundit gets enough visibility in the conservative media circuit they have a job for life as long as they continue to tow the party line. That’s because a group of extremely wealthy donors have created a loosely-affiliated group of well-funded fake think tanks, newspapers, pseudo-academic journals, etc, where not only is it more important to say the right things than to have any evidence, it’s also more important than actually making a profit or selling subscriptions. Part of this is a function of extreme wealth stratification which means that a small number of super-rich individuals have as much discretionary money at their fingertips as many small or middle-sized countries. A bunch of these people work together to use their wealth to influence public discourse.”
“Let me give you an example of how ridiculous things have gotten. If you want to get your book on a best-seller’s list, there are companies out there that for a fee plus expenses will organize a campaign where they will buy thousands of copies of your book in ways that aren’t obvious to put you on the map as a ‘serious’ author. This is such a big problem that the New York Times has a set of secret rules it uses to generate their best-sellers’ list and they keep changing them in order to keep one step ahead of these scam artists.”
“Another thing to consider is some very large news sources haven’t made a profit in years and years---yet they still chug along putting out conservative spin. That’s because their publishers are so obscenely wealthy that they can afford to keep an unpopular money-pit afloat simply because it gives them a platform to spew their own private ideological nonsense.”
“I could go on, but the point is that there is an entire ‘alternative reality’ news system and if anyone gets a profile on it, they can be pretty much guaranteed a very highly-paid, not terribly demanding job---as long as they continue to make the same talking points as everyone else.”
“It’s insidious because it not only creates a tremendous number of idiotic spokespeople, it twists even more ‘wannabes’ who parrot their talking points on the hope that they too can get on the wingnut welfare tenure track.”
“We need to prepare you to survive in that arena. So if you could walk into the back room I’ll introduce you to my actors and they’ll get you ready for the nasty world of conservative spin---.”
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These weekend literary supplements are supposed to be "fiction", but just about everything I put in them has some basis in fact. I've read that people tend to remember information put in story form more than in essay style---which is why I've started experimenting with this format. If you think that this is worthwhile and can afford it, why not support my efforts by subscribing? It's easy to do with Patreon and Pay Pal.
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Wayne showed Mikhi a back door which they walked through. They entered a room with a sofa aimed at a big screen tv. There was a coffee urn, some bottled water, soft drinks, cans of beer, little plastic bottles of hard liquor, and, some candy. “Please be seated”, someone will come and get you in a few minutes. Watch the tv, it’s a live feed from the studio and will let you know what’s broadcast before you come on the show.”
He sat down and tried to relax. Then a woman came in and told him to come with her to get ready for the interview. Once they got into her little work room, she put him up on a high stool, wrapped a sheet around him to protect his clothing, then she primped and sprayed his hair, then applied some makeup on his face to cut down on camera glare. Then she got him to take off his jacket, she hung a wireless battery and transmitter pack off his belt in back, ran a wire under his shirt and up his spine, over his collar, to the front where she clipped the attached microphone to his first shirt button. He put his jacket back on and she took him back to the “green room” to wait. She told him not to sit on the sofa but rather a stool that was back in the corner.
“The sofa is actually there so people will relax in them and rumple their clothes. The real ‘pros’ always sit on that stool, which is why it’s there. Also, don’t drink any of the coffee. Sometimes it’s got extra caffeine added to it to make people jumpy or give them the urge to use a toilet. This gives the interviewer a bit of an edge. I hope I don’t have to warn you to not touch the booze. You might be tempted to have a beer or a shot to calm your jumpy nerves, but believe me, it won’t help. Also, it’s really important to watch that tv set. It will help you understand how they are setting up your interview---what clips they show first, what pre-commercial comments they make---even the advertisements can set a tone.”
“What we’re doing here is trying to let you know exactly what you are in for, and getting you to live it works much better than just telling you.”
She left. He carried the stool out of the corner and sat on it watching the tv. It made for fascinating viewing.
There was a clip of out-of-work oil workers standing with signs proclaiming things like ‘climate change is a crock’ followed by another one of a complex graph with a voice-over by someone saying it proved beyond a doubt that if there was any change, it was insignificant and probably caused by sunspot activity instead of whatever humans were doing. Then the show’s host came on and said he had a guest, the “infamous” Mikhail Bookchin who was the host of the “so-called” Climate Trials. Then they cut to three short commercial spots. The first was for some sketchy guy with a pony tail who whipped out a roll of money and said that he was offering “cash money” for people’s “old gold”. The next ad suggested that people buy a “100% efficient electric space heater that was “hand built out of real American hardwood by Amish craftsmen”. The final one talked about a miracle weight loss pill that cleared the build-up of fecal matter that gathered in people’s lower intestine “like drywall compound”.
At that point a producer came in with a clipboard and a headset and walked Mikhi over to the studio. They did a quick sound check, and then the host turned from camera one to camera two, which allowed him to be on-air while facing his guest. He got right to the point with his first question.
“So what do you have against the oil industry and the hard-working people who make their living from it?”
“Not much, but I do want everyone---including these ‘hard-working people’---to avoid suffering from runaway climate change. That would cause huge problems for everyone---especially people who are on the bottom rungs of our economy.”
“You say that, but aren’t you in favour of putting everyone who works in the fossil fuel sector out of work?”
“Well, I’d like them to find other jobs that don’t damage the planet. And I’d like them to get those jobs now rather than later when we are fighting tooth and nail to deal with more and more extreme weather, major flooding on our coastlines, runaway forest fires, and so on. The thing is those jobs are doomed no matter what we do. The point is to try to transition people away from them while we still have some leeway in the economy instead of just dumping them down the toilet when we are in the midst of a climate-induced state of emergency.”
The host turned back to camera one and did a quick segue to the commercials: “When we come back, I’ll have a short clip from a different point-of-view and see what our guest has to say about that”.
Two producers dashed onto the set. They dusted both of them with a powder puff to hide the sweat that was peeking through the makeup because of the heat from the spot lights. The one doing Mikhi suggested that he look at the monitor over the host’s head so he could see what the clip was that the station was showing before they went back on air. The host, who knew what was coming, had a quick conversation with his producer but Mikhi couldn’t figure out what they were saying.
The ads were for a brand of adult diaper, a pill that offered a cure for erectile dysfunction, and, an alarm that people could wear around their necks---it had an actor making a plaintive call of “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” By now Mikhi had figured-out the demographic this show served.
Then the clip came on.
A young man in a nice suit with hair in one of those heavily-sculpted confections that looks vaguely like a rooster’s comb was saying “the climate change freak-out is a perfect encapsulation of the liberal movement”. He went on to spell out a self-serving “theory” of social change that suggested a class of political opportunists were using people’s naive concern about a fake environmental problem to push a socialist agenda. He went on to say that environmentalists were invariably “water-melons”: green on the outside, but red in the middle.
He cited “proofs” declaring when you hear someone talking about the icecaps melting they will soon transition to talking about taxing the rich, getting people to use public transit instead of personal automobiles, living in apartments instead of owning their own home in the suburbs, socialized---which is just another word for rationed---healthcare, and so on. He said they are using environmentalism as a Trojan horse for destroying the basic economic freedoms that made our nation the envy of the world.
The light on the camera that was facing Mikhi went on and the host went straight to the question. “You saw Ira Kapori suggest that environmentalism is being used to push a socialist agenda. How do you respond to that?”
“I suppose it depends on how you define ‘socialism’. But in general large-scale problems tend to call for government solutions. There have been economists who have come up with market-based mechanisms that would incorporate environmental considerations into “the bottom line”. And a lot of business people and even some conservative political parties have in the past expressed support for things like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Unfortunately, their support has been like a mirage---the closer society gets to actually using them, the more support for them among conservatives goes away.”
“But why would any conservative support a tax grab?”
“Because it isn’t. If the government taxed air, businesses would start researching how to breath water. That’s the point, not the revenue raised but the change in behaviour. In fact, a lot of carbon tax systems are designed to be revenue neutral---for every dollar raised through carbon pricing, a dollar in taxes will be cut from some other source---like income.”
“Encouraging businesses to cut their fossil fuel bill almost invariably increases productivity. That’s because we are taxing something we don’t want---waste---instead of something we do want---profit.”
“So you’re saying that the government should pick winners and losers instead of the market----. We all know how well that works.”
“Not individual businesses---but entire sectors of the economy, yes. And we don’t ‘all know how well that works’. The government controlled the economy this way during WWII and it did things like produce one liberty ship a day for years. More recently, the government---through the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)---invented email as a way of being able to send messages even if the national telecommunications network was damaged. Not only that, but a huge number of important technological innovations have come from government contracts with universities. Actually, it’s total nonsense to say that the government is incapable of picking ‘winners’---they do it all the time.”
At this point one of the producers started making the “wind it up” sign with her hands. The light went off on the camera facing Mikhi and one of the other producers looked at him and made a sign to say his mike had been cut. The host had the last word: “Well, I think we all know now where you are coming from. I just hope that some of our freedoms still remain if your Brave New Green World comes into existence. Such a shame if we gave up all our freedom for a fake problem pushed by a bunch of egg heads who never had to work a day in their lives---”.
At that point, Mikhi got hustled off the set, his microphone was removed, and, he was unceremoniously led to the door back to Wayne’s office.
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