Media Matters boot camp readies liberal policy wonks for the camera’s close-up

As Brenner sipped tea, Westen pontificated about the similarities between human and sheep brains and then conducted some psychological experiments on the class to demonstrate “a heightened state of latent activation in your brain.” To emphasize the point, he played a Fox News clip, showing anchor Shepard Smith accidentally referencing a sex act in a segment about Jennifer Lopez. As the class chirped, Westen observed that while “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” the clip revealed that certain words and images triggered powerful, and usually unspoken, thoughts in the viewer’s mind.

The word “Liberal” then appeared on the screen, surrounded by “elite,” “big government,” “sushi-eating” and “latte-drinking.” Westen explained that the “right has spent 40 years and tens of billions of dollars” tarnishing the once-proud label. “In this room, it’s like: Feminism and lesbianism? Yeah!” he observed approvingly. But TV watchers elsewhere don’t feel the same. In short, anything “liberal” fires the wrong synapses.

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“For the average person,” Westen said, “this is not a good network to be activating.”

After a lunch of Cajun chicken and shrimp, the participants returned to a classroom bursting with the energy of Kohut, Neffinger and Pendleton, the “KNP Boys” as Westen called them. The class leaders tossed markers and exclaimed, “Let’s diagram this!” They projected an image of a middle-aged woman — one of the instructor’s aunts, grinning in a kitchen — and then explained that the entire point of the course was to win over swing-voting aunts nationwide.

The key, they explained, was to ooze likability and reasonableness, and make their opponents seem otherwise. A talk-show host acts as a proxy for the viewer, they counseled, so it was critical to maintain a good rapport.

“Even if you are failing on a number of levels,” Pendleton said, all is not lost “if you have forward energy.”

Neffinger cautioned the class that Fox hosts would treat them as predictable liberals. “And so, as they say in the theater,” he said, “you are playing against type.”

Brenner volunteered to take the hot seat.

“Twitter, tweeter, what does it all mean?” Pendleton asked condescendingly.

“When I started working at MySpace,” said Brenner, trying to draw a connection with the woman in the kitchen, “I didn’t even have a MySpace page.”

The instructors explained that referencing MySpace might be a bit esoteric.

“Should I start with how Murdoch owned MySpace?” Brenner asked.

The participants spent the rest of the afternoon being grilled by instructors who, with pitch-perfect Bill O’Reilly bombast, called them callous for refusing to intervene in Libya, cowards for cutting-and-running in Afghanistan, profligate for defending government spending and out of touch for putting religious tolerance above the war on terror. In response, the participants practiced their media martial arts.

Brenner nodded in knowing agreement as the class learned that journalists were conflict-seeking showmen, easily disarmed by the use of their first names or compliments on the cleverness of their questions. The participants became adept in the craft of the pivot and setting up far-left straw men to make their own left-leaning positions seem more moderate. They jotted their talking points on Media Matters envelopes and heard about the supremacy of storytelling.