The anatomy of a Tome smear campaign
Friday, May 22, 2009, 1:44pm
Smear campaigns aren’t common in Valencia County, but it seems one has popped up recently in Tome, and of course, at issue is the county hospital.
Two weeks ago several pro-agriculture, anti-hospital signs were vandalized, sprayed with paint. Now someone is pushing a flyer in the Tome area, trying to drive a wedge between the community and a few citizens involved in opposing the hospital.
A smear campaign starts with an accusation. In the case of the Tome smear campaign, the primary accusation is that several citizens are abusing their access to the Thome Dominguez de Mendoza Community Center to plot their opposition to the hospital and raise funds for their efforts. The accusation, by its nature, is a loose mix of fact and opinion, that way it’s accurate enough to be believed by its recipients. In other words, it’s true the citizens are using the community center, they’re talking about the hospital both during public meetings at the center and privately elsewhere, and they’ve received donations for their efforts, though not through any formal fundraising. The opinion is that the citizens are abusing their access. The loose facts are used to back up that opinion.
The second step in a smear campaign is to decide the mode by which it’ll be pushed into the public sphere. The most common smear campaigns in Valencia County occur before elections. They’re called whisper campaigns, where one person says, “Did you know such and such candidate did this and that,” which starts a chain of private conversations spreading the meme. The Tome smear instead uses a flyer to get the message across.
The third step in the smear campaign is actual distribution. This is the point at which the campaign leaves the control of the accuser, to the accuser’s benefit, because he or she doesn’t want it traced back to the source. In the Tome smear campaign, the accuser quietly distributed the flyer in strategic locations where it would be seen. From there, the flyer is distributed by recipients unaffiliated with the accuser. Plus, discussion of the accusation occurs, as more and more people see or hear about it.
Finally, the smear campaign reaches its end when — or if — the media finds out about it to report on it, or if the media never reports on it, when the chain of distribution by the recipients stops. The media is usually too late to affect the outcome of the campaign. The smear thoroughly spreads throughout the community, the accusation sinks in, and only then does the media get to offer any clarification. The media is unable to trace the source of the campaign because it’s anonymous to begin with, it’s distributed only initially by the accuser with recipients taking possession of its distribution soon after, and it’s been in the possession of too many people. No smear campaign is linear, starting at Point A (the accuser) and heading straight to Point B (the media). If so, it’d be easier to find the accuser. Instead, it goes through twists and turns to get from one to the next.
In elections, smear campaigns are effective because elections often hinge on swaying one or two percent of the vote. But in the context of the county hospital project, which now depends on a decision from the Court of Appeals, there is no effect on the outcome of that decision.
Some might say public support for the anti-hospital group could be negatively impacted, but the only reason to want to affect public opinion is to affect the county commission’s decision-making, and the commission, for now, has ceded all control of the issue to the court and a private nonprofit, both of which don’t have to concern themselves with public opinion.
And just like the trouble the media has finding the source, so too does law enforcement. While the Tome letter doesn’t appear to have anything criminal or indisputably libelous in it, its possible connection to the sign vandalism makes it evidence, and that’s probably why the letter sits in the Valencia County Sheriff’s Department’s official file for the vandalism investigation.
