NMM-TV Brazil Watch: The Fake Ovation Noise Machine and Media Monopoly Blackout Scandal

NMM-TV Brazil Watch: The Fake Ovation Noise Machine Scandal

The PSDB-PFL candidate accuses the PT incumbent several times in their debate of faking video of applause from an address to the UN General Assembly. The Netroots and MSM amplify the point. We compare the footage against the UN’s own Webcast and draw conclusions about that point, its importance in the general scheme of things, and the campaign strategy and tactics of the PSDB-PFL and PT.

Conclusion: Yes, whoever prepared the PT’s election programming edited in about a half-second of applause cut from another portion of the Webcast.

General observation: Most of Lula’s problems of the last several years, of which this is a trivial example, have involved public relations professionals — most notably PT party officials Duda Mendonça and Delúbio Soares and the infamous political marketer Marco Valério of Belo Horizonte, known as “Baldy,” who mounted a massive caixa dois operation for the ruling PSDB in Minas Gerais, then offered it to the new mob that took over the Planalto in 2002.

Hey, a client is a client. And some of them bit.
Our free advice to the PT: Fire that PR firm. They’re just another gang of incompetent aloprados. If they can’t follow the party line on best practices in political advertising, get somebody who will.

To me, this is the most interesting issue in this whole election: the internal debate within the PT between those who want to explore some of the nastier techniques of U.S.-style campaign PR techniques and those who say, “First thing we do is fire all the marketing professionals.”

Our free advice to the opposition, however, is this: Your dwelling on that half-second failed to distract me from the substance of the message delivered to the UN General Assembly, which I was able to find on the Internet after failing to find the integral text in any organ of the Brazilian media.

Having taken — and passed, by the way, for what it’s worth — the teste de farinha, I think I have a pretty good of the different between a mountain and a molehill.

All of which makes me think much less of you than I do of the PT’s choice of video production team.

Not that I am likely to think well of you at this point, after looking closely at your campaign tactics and this Carlist wing of the PFL you have hooked up with.

They are old-time fascists, as far as I can see.

And I use the f-word in its technical sense, by the way.

I would much rather hear you talk about Lula standing up there and taking credit for an AIDS medication program which, I believe, started when José Serra was Health Minister, and was a point of pride of the previous government.

My wife, for example, still gets a very positive vibe when reminded of that program.

There do seem to be quite a few sane and honest Christian social democrats left in the PSDB, after all.

Time for them to either take back the party or resign in protest.

After all, you progressive USP paulistas, whether you march for Sam the Toucan or the Man Who Wears the Red Star, share many of the same values, right?

But differ as to the means of achieving them, right?

I personally think — IMHO — that there’s still mileage left in the argument that your proposals for achieving those goals might get Brazil there faster.

Are you really so convinced of your own irrelevance and ineptitude now that you think you can only win by playing on an atavistic fear that the Commie mud people who clean your pool are going to appropriate your (onshore) bank accounts and impregnate the innocent minds of your lily-white daughters with their rap music?

That’s really despicable. I’m sorry. But it is.

And that nasty undertone in your campaign rhetoric is a lot more obvious than your PR geniuses seem to think.

Among a growing segment of global public opinion, people just like you are the true moral lepers.

Why provide more evidence to support the belief?

And remember what the Gosepls say about the mote in the eye of the other and the beam in one’s own.

Next episode: We reality-test PFL campaign programming and investigate IRI influence on stragegy and tactics

I believe there are very good reasons to suspect substantial influence.

The style of negative campaigning is striking in many technical particulars, first of all.

Investigating the institutional ties between Latin American right-wing parties, organizations like Opus Dei and El Yunque, and Bush administration “faith-based” quango initiatives, run through the State Dept., is starting to flesh out that first impression.

Bias in the Booth?

By the way, I’m surprised that nobody has gone after that UN Webcast production team for editorializing on the job — with its selection of reaction shots, for example.

Like the one that shows that permanently interim-appointed U.S. ambassador John Bolton did not show up.

And that interpreter commits a professional sin, IMHO, by giving so much urgency and expression to the words.

Lula’s actual tone of voice was much more measured.

Then again, why am I not surprised?

No one really cares much for our pigfucker foreign policy any more.

Despite the best efforts of the omnicompetent and ubiquitous Karen Hughes, who plays desperate surbuban soccer mom to the benighted world.

Theme music: (1) John Adams, “You Won at Poker,” from Nixon in China; (2) Iggy & The Stooges, “Corruption.”

Speak, monkey, speak.