You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (4): Patterns of Conflict

I am not sure if you have been following the saga of the North Carolina GOP nominee for governor, Mark Robinson. Last week CNN’s K-File, “the leading investigation team for the social, mobile generation,” reported that “more than a decade ago” Robinson had posted various comments to an … um… adult web site under a pseudonym.

CNN provided several pull quotes of Robinson’s supposed comments that expressed fondness for certain genres of the adult industry, another stating that “I’m a black NAZI!”, and another that “slavery was not bad”

CNN has been going to town for the past week on this, reporting on what Robinson wrote, then reporting on reactions to what he wrote, then reporting on his campaign crumbling based on what they reported, and then reporting on reactions to the campaign crumbling… you know the drill. This story showed up on every corporate media outlet with every story stating, often several times, that Robinson was “Trump endorsed.”

Did I mention that the Robinson story got more and longer play than the second attempt on Trump’s life?

Let’s face it, while Robinson denies the story and we can poke holes about a few sensational quotes and the larger context, Robinson is politically finished. He was already behind in the polls before the story broke and people, or enough of them, exercise an abundance of caution when it comes to casting votes for people they suspect might be p**n-watching Black Nazis. That’s just the way life is.

Early in my career I was taught an early version of “dance like no one was watching, but text and e-mail like it will end up in court” or as my mentor said “act like what you are doing is going to end up above the fold of a newspaper.” I also recognized thirty years ago that the Internet was forever

I’m not going to excuse what Robinson wrote and if as a Christian he is being a hypocrite in some ways, well, so are many of the people I see on Sunday. We are all dependent on God’s grace. Robinson is finished. His staff is quitting, no doubt fund-raising is collapsing faster than his polls.

However let’s leave Robinson the man aside for a moment and focus on the larger structure of the story.

A man running for governor, in a race and state that has little to no national significance, made some inane and perverted comments on an adult web site more than a decade ago and long before he entered public life. CNN did not provide any evidence that Robinson has engaged in any such behavior since then, let alone while being in public office.

This same man running for governor has been dropping in the polls for the past three months, from a tie in June to 14 points down at the beginning of September, long before this story broke.

So in the middle of one of the most contentious elections in our nation’s history, already studded with extraordinary events such as multiple attempted assassinations of one candidate and the last-minute withdrawal of an incumbent president, CNN decides to focus its “crack” K-File team on this obscure state-level race.

CNN made an extraordinary investment of resources into investigating Robinson. The piece on Robinson runs more than 1,800 words, nearly 2x the average word count for the other K-File stories which deal almost exclusively with people and issues on the national tickets. The Robinson expose broke with the general “he-said, she-said” pattern of those other stories and actually involved some real digging through primary material. CNN traced Robinson’s supposed pseudonym through other sites and forums, through Twitter. A real, honest-to-goodness investigative report.

Then there was the fore-mentioned coverage CNN gave to its reporting, giving it multiple spots every day on the network, top-page coverage on the web site. The story got national play across multiple outlets for several days. This incredible focus on an obscure race in North Carolina during not only the final weeks of the most tense national elections in our history, but a few days after the second assassination attempt against the Republican nominee.

Note, again, for all of the work that went into the story, CNN provided no evidence Robinson has visited any such sites or made any related remarks for more than a decade.

So why did CNN do it? Why run this hit piece? A proverbial mountain out of a mole hill? In the doldrums of an off-year election, this might have been a one-day story with maybe a follow-up or two in an off-year election but not the multiple day media frenzy it became. A story of local or regional importance, but not the national feeding frenzy it became. Why?

Was it another entry from the old playbook of “exposing the high holy Republican hypocrite”? No Robinson is too small game given the circumstances.

Maybe hurt Trump in the swing state of North Carolina by depressing Republican turn-out? Perhaps, but a little overboard. The story did break right before the ballots were printed so that Robinson is going to be an albatross on the NC GOP from now until Nov. 5′ however, too local and regional.

Provide a little stray voltage to switch the topic from the second Trump assassination attempt? No, this story was in the works for weeks and plus the lefty media has already latched onto the P. Diddy story to provide that electrical juice.

Provide a pretext to keep mentioning the words “Trump”, “slavery”, “Nazi” and “p**n” together in the same sentence for several days? Yeah now I think we’re onto something. The other night I heard the opening from Monday’s Rachel Maddow show where she repeated Robinson’s comments, linked him to Trump, and came to the conclusion that this is was what Robinson (and Trump) had in store for all us if elected.

This is nut-picking on steroids, but it’s information warfare par excellence. After all the media isn’t going to into the past and report on how more important figures than Mark Robinson have shady parts of their past; Tim Walz and China, Bernie Sanders and his cozying up to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

CNN’s hit piece is accomplishing three goals for the Left. First it is appealing to swing voters by pointing to what they can sell as a real-life Republican fascist (Robinson). Second it’s strengthening cohesion among the Democratic base by using Robinson as a symbol of the stakes involved. Three, and I think most importantly it’s sowing confusion and doubt among parts of the Republican coalition both by exploiting fissures and by spreading demoralization at a critical time.

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

John Boyd had a lot to say about the psychological aspects of conflict, from “Organic Design for Command and Control”:

Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops to enmesh adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic chaos … and/or fold adversary back inside himself so that he cannot cope with events/efforts as they unfold.

Cohesion vs. Disruption

That’s what the Robinson story is about.

If he was around today, Boyd would have a lot to say about what’s about to go down over the next several months.