Friday, July 09, 2004

 

Frank Luntz is evil

From last week's NOW with Bill Moyers:

LUNTZ: That's a good question. But the way that I look at it is not to convince the voter what to think, it's to convince the voter that what they think is correct. Some of this is not a matter of re-educating them. Some of this is a matter of just explaining that their gut instincts are correct.

That they should not be fooled by either what they see or what they hear. That what they feel is what is correct. And that's a lot of it, by the way. It's not just language. It's style, it's presentation.



My problem with this is that it's raising apathy to a virtue. It's encouraging ignorance as well as discouraging intellectual curiosity. If Mr. Luntz had been around in the nineteenth century, would we still be teaching evolution in schools (Kansas excepted - ok, a small joke)? If Mr. Luntz had been around in the 60s, would the Civil Rights movement have ever happened, or would he have encouraged white Americans to continue to believe in racist beliefs because that's what their gut told them?

Mr. Luntz's approach is completely antithetical to a democracy. A democracy requires that its participants be involved and intellectually curious. Mr. Luntz is insulting. What bugs me even more than Mr. Luntz is that his approach seems to work. sigh...

Check out this little gem from 2000

Frank Luntz's bio on NOW

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