UK - Tories copy Republican dirty tricks

Wow! No bias in this Times report is there?

THE Conservatives are studying how to adapt the aggressive internet campaign tactics used by US Republicans with such devastating effect against John Kerry in the last presidential election.

Tim Montgomerie, a former aide to successive Conservative leaders, has been dispatched to Washington by Francis Maude, the party chairman, on a five-week mission to learn about the powerful impact technology is having on American politics — and how it can be applied against domestic enemies such as Labour or the BBC. [Seems I'm not the only one that sees the BBC as an enemy. ]

He cited the success of groups such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 which successfully dented Democratic hopes by attacking Kerry’s Vietnam War record.

“One of the lessons of 2004 is that the best stuff was done by proxy, not by the central party machine,” he said. “The mainstream media would not go against Kerry. But out there — in the conservative web structure — was the ability to show videos and raise money for the Swift Boat Veterans. In some ways they did the dirty work for the Republican Party.”

Another 2004 victory for the right-wing bloggers — who produce online diaries and opinion columns — was against the CBS network. Its executives were fired and Dan Rather, the veteran news anchorman, was forced to retire after blogs showed that a CBS report questioning President Bush’s National Guard service had been based on forged documents.

Well since the bloggers were right both about Kerry and CBS, how can that be said to be dirty tricks? It was the truth.

There's more...

Mr Montgomerie also praised conservative bloggers such as Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com, whose book An Army of Davids suggests that technology can be used to “beat big media, big government and other Goliaths”.

In Britain this could be applied by the Tory blogs to tackle perceived left-wing media bias. “The BBC is the obvious place to start,” he said. “It is our No 1 target.”

There's nothing perceived about the the BBC's left wing bias.
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