Whatever the merits of the claims made about Fox News by Obama’s communications team, it can be good strategy to pick a fight with your critics. To the very long list of reasons, add this one. If you can make them so angry that they lose the will to say anything at all nice about you, then you have won a major victory. For then they will have lost all (remaining) credibility.
Top Posts
- Is It Just Your Imagination or Do All Radio Stations Play Ads at the Same Time?
- How To Open A Bag of Charcoal
- Why Is It A Crime To Park Facing The Wrong Way?
- What is the Recommended Serving Temperature for Guinness?
- Golden Balls Solved?
- A Nice Exercise (or Nasty, Depending on How You Look At It)
- The Urinal Game As An Introduction To Sociology
- Game Theory of Poker
- I Move That The AEA Stop Publishing Papers and Proceedings
- Grandmasters Play the Beauty Contest Game
Tags
art
art of office politics
banana seeds
blog
books
boston
california
chicago
coffee
computers
crime
current events
decision-making
economics
education
evolution
family
financial crisis
food and wine
friends
funny
game theory
incentives
iPhone
kludge
language
law
marriage
maths
movies
music
obama
politics
psychology
publishing
sandeep has bad taste
sanitation
sport
statistics
suicide
teaching
terrorism
the web
tomatoes
travel
TV
vapor mill
war
winter
writing
Subscribe via RSS
Jeff’s Twitter Feed
- RT @retsoor: a way to monetize nothing extract nutrients from tears keep the lights on w love eat suffering & drink fear 2 days ago
- djokovic hearing: the government and djokovic's attorneys all seem to agree that the danger is inflaming anti-vax… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 3 days ago
- Come up with a model in which Putin invades Ukraine when Biden is President but not when Trump is President. 4 days ago
- RT @markleidner: mulder: why does it feel like when a musician dies, they actually do die, though their music lives on… whereas if a poet d… 5 days ago
- RT @retsoor: [attention shoppers voice] love everything while you can 1 week ago
Cheap Talk 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 18, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Todd
That doesn’t make any sense at all. Since when is being nice necessary for being honest? And isn’t credibility about honesty? I think the phrase “brutally honest” would suggest that some of the most trusted sources are often some of the harshest critics.
October 18, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Bill
If your critics say bad things about your policies all the time, then they lose credibility as they say bad things even when the truth is not so bad and they should be saying nice things. You have to be honest about the nice thing some of the time to have credibility when you are nasty when you know you should be nice.
October 19, 2009 at 2:56 am
Jim
…unless the truth is always bad, so nice things are never warranted.