The Sinclair Maneuver

Whenever I play chess it is usually against players who are far more skilled and more knowledgeable of the history of the game than I am. Chess is among the many things about which I know very little. I can start by moving my horsie-thing or the third pawn from the left, and the other player will say "Oh, that's the classic Reverse Polish Opening," or something like that. I do know that I was once able to execute a perfect Fool's Mate, which involves getting a checkmate within the first three moves. It's apparently not an easy thing to do, and my friend was pretty astonished that I was able to work out exactly which three moves I needed to make to get myself checkmated so quickly.

I don't know the technical details of chess because I've never studied them. Spassky and Fischer and Karpov and Kasparov are very nearly just names to me. I can play the game and enjoy it without knowing these things, but knowing them might help me to enjoy the game on a deeper level.

For some time now it has been extensively reported that the Sinclair Broadcasting Company was going to require its affiliates to preempt prime-time programming to run an anti-John Kerry diatribe called Stolen Honor. The anti-Kerry forces were smugly rejoicing, the Kerry supporters were complaining in advance to the FCC about what they viewed as a plan to violate the rules of political advertising (and were turned away on the grounds that while preemption may be a fine reason for bombing a country and killing thousands of its citizens because it might be thinking of maybe someday developing a plan that could possibly allow it to eventually aspire to being a threat, it is not a valid reason for stopping a television program before it has a chance to violate FCC rules), and at least one employee of Sinclair Broadcasting lost his job because of his criticism of the planned broadcast.

Suddenly, as reported in this article by Dana Stevens in Slate, things have changed. Sinclair maintains that it is not planning to broadcast the Stolen Honor program, that it never planned to broadcast it, and any reports to the contrary are simply inaccurate.

Instead, what they will do is broadcast a "news special" which "will focus in part on the use of documentaries and other media to influence voting, which emerged during the 2004 political campaigns, as well as on the content of certain of these documentaries." In other words, rather than running the controversial documentary/political attack ad, now it will run a story about the controversial documentary/political attack ad and the controversy surrounding it. As the saying goes, the story has become the story.

This is an classic example of a variety of political demagoguery: create a controversy, let the controversy and criticism of the controversy build, then suddenly declare yourself to be an innocent victim of the controversy, and turn your critics' criticisms back on themselves. On the Internet, this sort of thing is known as trolling.* To someone who has not been observing how these political games are played, it may appear to be a series of completely spontaneous and unrehearsed events. But to someone who has been studying these sorts of political shenanigans, the machinations are as obvious as the French Defense is to a knowledgeable chess player.

It's nothing new. Banana Republicans discusses how this sort of thing is practiced by acolytes of the conservative media on college campuses. On pages 76-80 the authors cite three examples of articles written to incite racial or gender-issue controversy, for the purpose of drawing attention to the controversy and casting the creators of the controversy as its hapless victims. One example of this is the Jason Mattera/Judy Shepard incident. Links to the relevant articles can be found in the bibliography on this page - articles on the controversy link and open easily, but the article that started the controversy, "Judy Shepard Indoctrinates RWU", is a 4 MB .pdf file that will not open on my computer, at least not in a reasonable timeframe

Until now, Sinclair had only been in the national spotlight for its forbidding of affiliates to air an episode of Nightline in which the names of every U.S. soldier who had (up to that point) died in Iraq were read aloud. This time around it has engaged in a manipulation of the national media in order to turn the spotlight on itself to further the advancement of its political views. Let's hope that enough people have developed enough political savvy to recognize this ploy for what it is - and dismiss the Sinclair Maneuver as unworthy of their attention.

*"Trolling" is a word that has various definitions, depending on who is using the term. I have always viewed it as a sort of passive-aggressive way of creating controversy, reflecting the fishing-related derivation of the word in which a baited line is dragged behind a moving boat to see what might take the bait. (In this sense a blogger who makes outrageous and provocative statements in the hope of eliciting a heated response would be considered a troll. Such trolls will, in many cases, deny that they were trying to elicit any response at all, and will denounce any heated responses as being the work of trolls.) Other people view it as a more active behavior of direct attack, sometimes from a position of concealment. I disagree with this latter use of the term, regarding direct attacks as being an action unto themselves. I refer to anonymous attacks as "sniping."