"Selling Is Selling, and Lying Is Lying"

I have been selling television programs for almost 50 years. I have sold movies, old and new television shows and cartoons. Selling is what I do.

As part of the process we had a research department that could tell us what types of programs stations needed. Following the production of a pilot, they needed to point out why our programs were exactly what stations wanted and needed. We couldn't mislead our customers with our research, lest we be found out and lose our credibility-and probably our jobs.

We also had a public relations department to make sure that the stations; (and my management) knew exactly what we were doing. We presented our programs in the best possible way, but we could not lie about them.

We had an advertising department that placed adds in the trade publications telling everyone how great the pilots were that we were producing. Once again, we could position our program as best as we could, but we could not lie about them.

We had salesmen who were familiar with the product we were making who would visit the stations as often as possible to reinforce our message. Part of their responsibilities was to establish as good a relationship as possible with the station management. Lying was not acceptable.

It was/is apparent to me (and everyone else in the industry) that even professionals are susceptible to seeing what we wanted them to see. We would tell them how good our programs were, and repeat the message as often as possible. That was a major part of the process; repeat the message over and over again.

In each company I worked for I had a corporate president who judged me. He could expand or reduce my compensation and power, and as a result, I was required to satisfy him. If he was very unhappy with me, I could be fired. It works that way in most of the commercial world.

But not when we elect a president for 4 years.

And now I will discuss the president and HIS sales department. The president is the lead salesman, and he has no management to please. As a second term president he cannot run again, yet he would like nothing better then to regain his popularity.

The president and his people have a goal: to retain as much of their power as long as they possibly can, enabling them to resume the dismantling of 75 years of social welfare programs started by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930's, and thereby change the social order in our country.

To rebuild his popularity, the president is selling the war in Iraq the same way I would sell a television program-except that he is misleading and lying to the public. The president believes that he can make it up as he goes along.

The president controls a vast "research" department to assist him in this effort.

The president also has sales people. Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and others who are available to appear on all of the talk shows and repeat the same stuff over and over again-without ever being properly challenged.

Each time he or his sales department speaks, they have either trained up a couple of hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers and police, or improved the standard of living for the Iraqis. They diminish the number of Iraqis killed or wounded by our coalition forces, and somehow seem to trivialize the almost 20,000 casualties we have suffered so far.

What is the latest tool used by the administration? Of course it is blame the media for not reporting "the good stuff."

Their premise is the same as mine; repeat the message, over and over again. It matters not at all if the message is true or not.

Why would anyone expect what he or she is saying now to be true when they have all lied to us in the past?

There is a famous story about a powerful agent being caught by his wife and telling her, "Darling, what are you going to believe, what you just saw or what I tell you that you just saw?""

It is the responsibility of the broadcast media to point out to the public what they just saw and not to pay attention to those who tell them WHAT they just saw.

The reason that the president and his sales department can "get away with lying and misleading" is because the purported ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox "journalists" allow them to do it.

It must not be easy facing down power. I would love to see an unencumbered David Gregory "have it out" with Vice President Cheney. One has the sense that if any or all have the news guys confronted their guests, that they would soon be anchoring a news show in Billings, Montana.

Norman Horowitz

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