The CBS News reporter Lesley Stahl had been covering the 1984 presidential campaign, and as Election Day neared, she had an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t so much that Ronald Reagan had focused on emotions and moods rather than hard issues. It was more that the media was giving him a free ride; he and his election team, she felt, were playing the press like a fiddle. She decided to assemble a news piece that would show the public how Reagan used television to cover up the negative effects of his policies. A senior White House official telephoned her the evening it aired: “Great piece,” he said. “What?” asked a stunned Stahl. “Great piece,” he repeated. “Did you listen to what I said?” she asked. “Lesley, when you’re showing four and a half minutes of great pictures of Ronald Reagan, no one listens to what you say. Don’t you know that the pictures are overriding your message because they conflict with your message? The public sees those pictures and they block your message. They didn’t even hear what you said. So, in our minds, it was a four-and-a-half-minute free ad for the Ronald Reagan campaign for reelection.” Most of the men who worked on communications for Reagan had a background in marketing. They knew the importance of telling a story crisply, sharply, and with good visuals. Each morning they went over what the headline of the day should be, and how they could shape this into a short visual piece, getting the president into a video opportunity. They paid detailed attention to the backdrop behind the president in the Oval Office, to the way the camera framed him when he was with other world leaders, and to having him filmed in motion, with his confident walk. The visuals carried the message better than any words could do. As one Reagan official said, “What are you going to believe, the facts or your eyes?”
Daily Law: Nonplayers are masters at visual effects, to distract from their manipulations. Guard yourself by paying more attention to the content and the facts than the form of their message.
The Art of Seduction
: Soft Seduction—How to Sell Anything to the Masses