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9/12/00
3:25 p.m. By Jonah Goldberg, NRO editor--------------------JonahEmail@aol.com |
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The front-page story in the New York Times is fairly hysterical, as has been the coverage on the morning cable-news shows. The accusation is that the Republicans — particularly RNC ad man Alex Castellanos — have mounted an effort to brainwash the American people. This may well go down in the books as the biggest non-story of the 2000 campaign. First, let's assume Castellanos did insert the frame deliberately. Subliminal advertising doesn't work. Even Berke points out that "three decades of study have convinced most researchers" that subliminal advertising doesn't work. So one wonders why this is so pernicious. Perhaps if Castellanos had said "VOTE BUSH" in ancient Sanskrit the hysteria would be the same? After all, positive messages in dead languages don't work on voters either. But the message would be hidden, and there lies the evil of it all. If inserted on purpose, the motive was almost assuredly humor. Either way, so what? The crime here would be Castellanos's immaturity, not his nefarious plan to associate "rats" and "bureaucrats" in the minds of the American people — an association most people already make. Indeed, "rats" is hardly a nerve-touching word these days. Personally, I would have much preferred "dangerous," "life-threatening," or "monstrous stupidity." Still, since subliminal advertising doesn't work, the real crime here is that Castellanos didn't show the word "RATS" longer. The other possibility is that it was simply a mistake. This is what Castellanos himself says. He told the Times that the message was "purely accidental" and that "we're not that clever." Indeed, the word "RATS" appears for only one frame. This is called a "flash frame" because an image goes by so fast that you can't see what it was but it appears as a "flash" to some people. In television, each second of film is generally made up of 30 frames (some formats are slightly different). As a rule of thumb, the human eye can't pick up a single frame of information. It takes about three or four for most people to say, "What was that?" Berke says some people can see the word "RATS" at normal speed, though my guess is that they were told, "Look for the word 'RATS' when you watch this." When they saw a dark mass go by they imagined they saw the image they were looking for. That used to happen to me a lot when I was editing video. In fact, my own guess as a former television producer is that this was a mistake the producers caught late in the process and thought was pretty funny when it was spotted, so they left it in. In the age of digital editing, flash frames are pretty common, it seems to me, because people edit segments of video the way we move around paragraphs in word processors. In digital editing, a flash frame is the equivalent of leaving a widowed punctuation mark somewhere (or really a sliver of a punctuation mark). Considering that the word "RATS" clearly does come from the end of the word bureaucrats (you can even see a slice of the "C" in "CRATS" when they show it on TV) it seems almost impossible that someone said, "Let's shove the word 'RATS' in there." On the other hand, it's also probably unlikely that Castellanos was entirely ignorant of the "RATS" flash, as political commercials are only 30 seconds long and represent huge investments of manpower and money, so they tend to be fairly well picked-over. Regardless, the hysteria over this is outrageous. The Clinton-Gore campaign in the past has run ads accusing Republicans of burning churches and wanting to repeal the Civil Rights Act to less hoopla. Indeed, this story was first reported by Tony Snow on Fox News two weeks ago, on August 28 — which makes the hype not only ridiculous, but old news. (Even the Times itself, in its late edition, notes that Fox had the story.) I do wonder whether all of the incredibly "alarmed" and "stunned" academics Berke quotes would be so lacking in imagination if the Gore campaign were the guilty party here. Perhaps Darrell West, a political scientist quoted by Berke, wouldn't find such a gaffe "really extraordinary" in such circumstances. Indeed, I wonder if the story would have been written at all. |
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he latest bit of anti-Republican
hysteria comes with the New York Times report this morning that
the Republicans have included a "subliminal message" in their latest prescription-drugs
commercial. For an instant there is a flash frame in which one can see
the word "RATS." It is clearly the last four letters of the word, "Bureaucrats,"
after a jumble of words dance across the screen and we see Al Gore.
