Flood the zone

Reader question:

Please explain this passage, with “flood the zone” in particular:

The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s***. To put it less profanely, he recommended achieving policy goals by generating a mass of low-quality news stories, controversies and arguments, which would distract reporters intent on separating fact from fiction.

My comments:

You know what “s***” is, right?

Right. That’s good, so we won’t have to talk s*** in this space. We won’t, in other words, talk too much about the profane part of it, except perhaps a little about the craziness of American politics today.

Because from context, we can safely infer that this passage addresses American politics, specifically and very probably about Republican media strategy.

This is because Steve Bannon, former campaign strategist for former President Donald Trump, once used the exact same language to describe how they would like to deal with the media.

To wit, flood the zone with s***.

In other words, if the media calls out on our lies, tell more lies.

Basically, that is their strategy. To flood or inundate the space with so much falsehood (or s***) that the media will give up fact-checking you.

The fake news media, that is. They will eventually stop trying to separate fact from fiction – they’ll be too exhausted to do so.

Or, as stated in our example passage, “achieving policy goals by generating a mass of low-quality news stories, controversies and arguments, which would distract reporters intent on separating fact from fiction.”

Now, what kind of “policy goals” can they achieve by spreading falsehoods?

A good question to ask.

That’s all I’m going to say.

I just want to add that with the American election coming up in just a week (on November 5), it feels apt and appropriate to talk about “flood the zone”, a term popularized by Steve Bannon and a term you will definitely come across again if you follow American politics.

Oh, flood the zone.

The phrase itself is originally an American football jargon. Literally, it means putting a lot of people to defend a particular area. The idea is simple. If you put enough people to crowd an area, it makes it difficult for the opposition to effectively attack or defend that particular area.

That’s straightforward enough. Players run freely and fast when they’re let loose in an open area. In a crowd, there’s little they can do.

So, figuratively speaking, to flood the zone with something is to provide a large amount of it.

An overwhelming amount, actually.

All right, let’s read a few more media examples:

1. On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds. No matter how clear a case the Democrats made, it was always highly likely that no single version of the truth was ever going to be accepted.

This fact underscores a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship – some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.

But there’s another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment did very little to move public opinion.

The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process.

One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear.

My Vox colleague Dave Roberts calls this an “epistemic crisis.” The foundation for shared truth, he argues, has collapsed. I don’t disagree with that, but I’d frame the problem a little differently.

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This idea isn’t new, but Bannon articulated it about as well as anyone can. The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.

What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.

Bannon’s political objective is clear. As he explained in a 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference talk, he sees Trump as a stick of dynamite with which to blow up the status quo. So “flooding the zone” is a means to that end. But more generally, creating widespread cynicism about the truth and the institutions charged with unearthing it erodes the very foundation of liberal democracy. And the strategy is working.

- “Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy, Vox.com, by Sean Illing, February 6, 2020.

2. Reva Harvey didn’t know Vice President Kamala Harris would be coming to her church on Sunday. But with almost two weeks left until Nov. 5, she thought it was “essential” for her to do so.

Harvey, a 53-year-old Black woman whose birthday was one day before Harris’, said the vice president’s visit to the New Birth Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, could help her find older Black voters and give them “the information that they need.”

“You need to hit every corner, turn every song, just to be safe,” Harvey said at Harris’ Saturday rally in Atlanta.

Harris, a Baptist, capped off a week of heightened outreach to Black voters with visits last Sunday to two churches in the Atlanta area. Her focus underscores the importance for her in activating and persuading Black voters, the core of her party’s electorate, by going to a stronghold within the community.

At a CNN town hall on Wednesday night, Harris highlighted her faith, saying she prays “every day, sometimes twice a day.”

...

Harris has also done several interviews this month with Black male journalists on platforms with predominantly Black audiences in recent days such as a Detroit radio town hall with “The Breakfast Club” and host Charlamagne tha God, with “The Shade Room” and journalist Roland Martin’s “Black Star Network.”

Black Democratic operatives say these appearances may be as effective, if not more, in convincing undecided Black voters than specific policy plans.

“It is helpful to be in the spaces and to be with validators that are not of government or of the institutions,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne, who added that many young Black male voters who are undecided may have an already existing distrust with government. “You gotta flood the zone, and I think that’s what they're trying to do.”

- Kamala Harris turns to her faith in outreach to Black voters, CBSNews.com, October 24, 2024.

3. Republicans continue to flood the zone with favorable data to demonstrate not only can Donald Trump defeat the better-funded Kamala Harris in November, he can carry some Senate candidates with him in swing states and others besides.

That’s the takeaway from Senate Opportunity Fund internal polling swing states Nevada and Wisconsin and Senate battleground Ohio, which forecasts the GOP nominee going three for three and helping to flip based on surveys of 600 likely voters in each conducted between Oct. 19 and Oct. 22.

In Nevada, Trump leads Kamala Harris 50% to 47%, on the strength of being +88 with conservatives, who represent 41% of the sample. Additionally, he has an 11 point lead with men, while Harris is only up 4 with women.

Though much polling of the Senate race has shown Democrat Jacky Rosen comfortably ahead of Republican Sam Brown, the GOP internal suggests the race is a genuine jump ball with the 2 candidates tied at 48%. Additionally, they are both essentially even in image tests, with Brown at -1 and the incumbent treading water.

Brown is +85 with conservatives, and +8 with men, suggesting that his chances of winning are predicated on increasing turnout among those groups.

Wisconsin presents another chance for the GOP to win a doubleheader, with Trump up 48% to 47% over Harris, and businessman Eric Hovde leading Democratic perennial Tammy Baldwin 49% to 48%.

Trump is +86 with conservatives (44% of the Badger State sample), and +16 with men.

While the Senate candidate equals Trump’s +16 with men, Hovde is slightly stronger with conservatives, with an 88 point advantage over Baldwin.

Ohio, meanwhile, is not in doubt on the presidential ballot by most metrics. And the Senate Opportunity Fund’s survey is no exception, with the former president up 52% to 44%, buoyed by a 16 point lead with men and a tied race with women.

Trump is also +4 in favorability overall, while Harris is -8, further cementing the impression of inevitability.

- GOP internal poll shows Donald Trump could help flip Senate, NYPost.com, October 25, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）