Slate Magazine digs up a 1988 New York Times article where Roger Ailes explains why presidential campaigns use the media strategies they do:
‘There are three things that get covered,” said Ailes, then directing George H.W. Bush’s media campaign, ”[V]isuals, attacks, and mistakes.” A successful campaign, he continued, avoided mistakes and gave the TV networks “as many attacks and visuals” as they could.
So why the focus on mistakes? According to Jack Shafer,
The networks overdo mistake coverage because 1) it’s easy, 2) the other networks are doing it, 3) the opposing campaigns are goading them on, and 4) it creates space for yet another easy story when the candidate who has gaffed can point to a gaffe by his opponent.
And as James Fallows points out in his blog today, it’s incredibly difficult to avoid mistakes during exhausting high-pressure political campaigns:
The candidates have to answer questions and offer views roughly 18 hours a day, and any misstatement on any topic can get them in trouble. Why do candidates so often stick to a stump speech that they repeat event after event and day after day? Because they’ve worked out the exact way to put their positions on endless thorny issues — Iraq, abortion, the Middle East, you name it — and they know that creative variation mainly opens new complications.
If someone is campaigning for the presidency or vice presidency, there’s an extra twist. That person has to have a line of argument to offer on any conceivable issue. Quick, without pausing in the next ninety seconds, tell me what you think about: the balance of relations between Taiwan and mainland China, and exactly what signals we’re sending to Hamas, and what we think about Russia’s role in the G-8 and potentially in NATO, and where North Korea stands on its nuclear pledges — plus Iran while we’re at it, plus the EU after the Irish vote, plus cap-and-trade as applied to India and China, and what’s the right future for South Ossetia; and let’s not even start on domestic issues.
The point about every one of those issues is that there is a certain phrase or formulation that might seem perfectly innocent to a normal person but that can cause a big uproar. Without going into the details, there is all the difference in the world between saying “Taiwan and mainland China” versus “Taiwan and China.” The first is policy as normal; the second — from an important US official — would light up the hotline between DC and Beijing.
