Recently by Allan Stevo: Dr. No Gives Us a Chance To Pause and Reflect
A common complaint in the liberty movement is that the media is no help. For numerous reasons that's an ideal situation for us.
The Media Offers No Help
There are plenty of media sources that censor Ron Paul. We can react to that in a variety of ways. The reasons media sources do not mention Ron Paul are numerous. The goals of not mentioning him are few and include – 1. Discouraging his supporters and 2. Distracting his supporters.
They underestimate the ardent Ron Paul supporters if they think a supporter will get discouraged by Ron Paul's 89 seconds of time in a CBS debate. They underestimate us if they think a lack of mainstream media mention will get us down. They underestimate us if they think they will discourage us by acknowledging Ron Paul only when it looks like there's an opportunity to discredit him. The media utterly fails at discouraging Ron Paul supporters, because largely they don't understand the passion for freedom that Ron Paul supporters have. If you don't "get" freedom, you're going to have a hard time "getting" Ron Paul's supporters.
What the media succeeds at is the second goal. Ron Paul supporters can get easily distracted. Ron Paul supporters flood comments sections, chat rooms, and Facebook fan pages and make a big show of the latest outrage on the internet. But NONE OF THAT MATTERS. Only one thing matters in a campaign and that is winning. Some will say Ron Paul runs to preach the message of freedom, that he runs for the sake of debate, that he runs to inspire the future generations. There are lots of better ways to do that than spending very long hours campaigning. The reason to run a campaign is singular – to win. All the rest can be nice secondary bonuses, but when the Republican National Convention convenes in late August 2012 in Tampa, Florida, the only thing we want is to see Ron Paul with the nomination. Without that, the campaign is lost. That's all there is to it.
The way to beat every journalist and political analyst who laughs at Ron Paul and his supporters for their quaint notions of freedom is to win the GOP nomination.
A Media Myth
Here's a funny thing about the media – they think they matter. Every Ron Paul supporter bringing 10 friends (And as you're reading this, I hope you're making a list of who those 10 supporters will be!) to the polls with him renders the mainstream media meaningless. Bring 10 friends and it won't matter what the media says. Some will say it hasn't mattered for a while, and I don't think that's really true, but today the mainstream media can, for the first time, be made worthless in a presidential election. We can nullify them.
We can make every smug journalist from Tallahassee to Kauai spit out his coffee morning-after-morning after reading on the internet about Ron Paul's blazing success in the primaries the day before. You and I realize that interpersonal online connections matter, and that the mainstream media has in many ways stopped mattering. We will activate the networks we've spent years building, and we will use those networks to win the GOP nomination and then the U.S. presidency.
We Don't Need The Old Media and We Shouldn't Want Their Help
There are lies that can be told about every candidate. There are truths that can be spun to make every candidate appear ugly and to make it easier for any candidate to lose. When those attacks on Ron Paul begin, they will run rampant through the mainstream media with ease. When that happens, we will be grateful that we long ago gave up on the mainstream media and focused on building our own channels of communication instead of allowing the media to be the "communicator" of ideas for us.
The media had little to do with making Ron Paul popular – after all the people who learned enough about Ron Paul to want to vote for him did not learn about Ron Paul from the mainstream media – and therefore it would follow the media can do little to make Ron Paul unpopular. The members of our movement have generally learned not to pay the media much attention. While it has taken us a great deal of work to build these interpersonal networks that sidestep the media, it allows our movement to be much stronger, much more independent in its thoughts, and less prone to being influenced by the mainstream media.
To put a twist on a common political adage "A mainstream media strong enough to give you everything you want, is a mainstream media strong enough to take everything you have."
