The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
depraved governor himself. In fact, Massachusetts’ furlough program originated with Francis W. Sargent, Dukakis’ Republican predecessor as governor (Jamieson, 1992, p. 20). Television ads about the furloughs conveyed flak memes with 30-second gut-punch force. “By juxtaposing words and pictures” in an audiovisual slight-of-hand, one TV ad primed the false inference that 268 first degree murderers had jumped furloughs in Massachusetts (Jamieson, 1992, p. 19). Another ad focused on the case of William Horton and implied that he was a poster-boy for the Dukakis-orchestrated mayhem supposedly unleashed during his governorship in Massachusetts (1975–1979, 1983–1991). The ad described Horton’s furlough activities as “kidnaping,” “stabbing” and “raping” (quoted in Jamieson, 1992, p. 17). In turn, the eruption of a new form of weaponized discourse wrong-footed Dukakis’ campaign. The campaign initially ignored the ads as beneath contempt. By the time Dukakis pivoted to response, the flak toxins had circulated widely and the ads were recognized by a majority of voters who saw and recalled them (Jamieson, 1992, p. 36).
It is also important to notice that the ads were not the direct products of the Bush campaign. As Jamieson details, the ads originated with Bush-allied political action committees (PACs). Bush’s campaign was thusly insulated from backlash if the ads were judged to have breached the perimeter of good taste and/or honesty. There were further unstated but visceral aspects to the Horton case as well. To wit, Horton is African-American, his victims ←8 | 9→Euro-Americans, with all of the baggage that these optics have long mobilized in the US.
Once the inflammatory ads were in circulation, it became fair game to comment on and elaborate their content—as Bush obligingly did for the New York Times (Jamieson, 1992, p. 22). Even reporting that was critical of the ads fell into the sticky trap of reanimating their premises about Horton’s menace and proximity to Dukakis’ putatively skewed vision of law-and-order. In 1988, ads from PACs were the figurative crash-test dummies for flak memes that could jar public opinion—while simultaneously furnishing the beneficiaries of those memes with some distance from them. Distance, in turn, removed hints of grubby self-interest and provided cover should the delegitimizing flak discourse generate backlash.
Thirty years after Bush-Dukakis, what entities serve the flak purpose of injecting flak memes into wider public discourse? The answer is as large as the internet. YouTube or ostensible transparency, document-dump web sites can be conscripted to flak discourses and carry their flak memes far and wide—even all the way into mainstream media. Mark Turnbull, a managing director of Cambridge Analytica (CA), explained the logic while the now defunct company was practicing its dark political arts:
We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding—so it’s unattributable, untrackable. (quoted in Dallison, 2018, para. 13)
Following coverage of CA’s previously secret methods—tenaciously pursued in the United Kingdom by The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr in the face of flak (Guardian News and Media Press Office, 2018)—the firm claimed insolvency. However, strategically (and clandestinely) injecting flak toxins into the political bloodstream is a practice that did not originate, nor will it end, with CA—although the firm added a data-driven thrust to these practices.
Fact-Checking the Flak
Returning to Dukakis-Bush 1988, one may ask what was wrong with the Horton ads. After all, it is a fact that Horton skipped the furlough from a Massachusetts prison, went AWOL to Maryland, slashed a man and raped his finance while holding them captive for hours; heinous crimes, by any standard.
←9 | 10→
To begin, contra the implications of the ad, “first degree murderers” were not eligible for furlough in Massachusetts. Moreover, jumping furlough was defined as being more than four hours late returning to prison—a rare event that occurred in 0.0036–percent of cases. Horton presented the sole instance (and not one of 268) of someone committing further serious crimes on furlough out of 76,455 furloughs in Massachusetts during three-term governor Dukakis’ administration (Jamieson, 1992, p. 20).
The rationale of the furlough program was that prisoners who have limited release into the community prior to the end of their sentence are less likely to re-offend. If keeping people out of jail is the objective—as it should be, given the social and financial costs of incarceration—then there are empirically-backed logics for furloughs. These logics were also widely accepted by the 1980s. Jamieson observes that during the Reagan-Bush era, a similar furlough system was in place in the federal prison system—and Horton would have been eligible for a federal furlough at the time. Most U.S. states had similar furlough programs, including California during Reagan’s governorship decades earlier. Yet, through the ideological alchemy of flak discourse, the Horton case was not a horrific instance that could regrettably have happened anywhere—but the efflux of the peculiar social laboratory convened in elitist Massachusetts by Harvard geek cum madman Dukakis.
To summarize, the 1988 flak discourse did not merely criticize, but crafted baldly misleading memes toward the strategic end of disabling Dukakis’ campaign. Moreover, as it circulates, flak generates an aura of truth via sheer repetition, challenging the truth to catch up with its hoary discourse. As for Dukakis, he was sufficiently delegitimized by the 1988 campaign that he not only lost the election despite his summer lead in polls; he never ran for office again and was effectively retired from politics at age 57.
Audience Effects
In explaining the impact of the ads, Jamieson suggests that audiences to politics are often semi-distracted, observing from the corners of their eyes, scavenging fragments of discourse from the all-enveloping media environment. Moreover, information is not received in straightforward ways by audiences. Information is sculpted and reshaped while jostled within memory—not “filed away,” then immaculately retrieved from a filing cabinet in the mind (Loftus & Loftus, 1980). Moreover, during electoral campaigns, information is collated through one’s pre-standing sociopolitical beliefs and is more likely to be ←10 | 11→accepted if it is compatible with those beliefs (Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1969, pp. 87–93).
Jamieson documents how these audience effects played out in 1988 via focus group data:
1: “We should ship all our criminals to the college liberals in College Station [Texas].”
2: “Or Austin. Crime’s not statistics, honey.”
4: Dukakis supporter (37-year old male): “But Bush’s guy killed a pregnant woman, a halfway house, a parole place. That’s no different from Dukakis, Massachusetts.”
1: “That’s not his [Bush’s] fault.” (Jamieson, 1992, p. 32)
And that is that: in indignant language, Dukakis is symbiotically tied to Horton. Bush is, by assertion, remote from the federal furlough machine and thus exonerated. In this case, flak memes around Dukakis may have stuck more readily for their repetition across media channels during the fall of 1988—as well as for their tightly tailored fit with decades of right-wing discourse about “law-and-order.” It is an issue on which Republicans took ownership through aggressive repetition during the Nixon era—even as officials of Nixon’s government were ushered into prison. Massachusetts/Dukakisista policies on furloughs were unremarkable by national standards, but readily articulated to long-standing flak discourses of the right vis-à-vis crime.
Nineteen eighty-eight’s election witnessed startling memes, indirectly sourced through PACs then picked up by more mainstream media platforms; memes that were dishonest and played upon the audience’s vulnerabilities as concerns keeping facts straight in a media-saturated world. All of this was further complicated by audience members’ pre-standing ideologies. In each of these respects, the 1988 election’s flak campaign anticipated the state of play for contemporary flak. Nonetheless, the practices of flak are not static—and there are indeed striking contemporary imprimaturs on it in a new media environment.
The Twenty-First Century’s Planet of Flak
The 1988 campaign can be regarded in retrospect as a dress rehearsal for flak campaigns