Rove Story, Phase 2

The Karl Rove story gives the perception of following a typical pattern of marketing the news. News, as a media product, can be marketed, using the Toolbox, just as other media products such as books, movies and television programming.

In the first phase, Rove became more famous than he was before, using the conflict and prominence values. The sequence began by enabling a connection, in this case by Rove himself, between his name and the growing conflict story concerning a C.I.A. operative whose identity was revealed – a criminal offense - through a White House “leak.”

Thus Rove joined the original conflict and in so doing created a second conflict, between those in the public and private sectors anxious to accuse him, and those anxious to defend him. In past days, the one side has called for Rove’s resignation, or firing, while the other side has called him a hero. It is the second conflict that swelled the audience, making Rove more famous.

The second value, prominence, came into automatic play by the media literally focusing on Rove, in a series of print and broadcast images of Rove in his “old fame” as a top aide and strategist in the Bush administration. In his “old fame” days, viewers responded to the prominence value by looking at the president, with “some other men” in the background. Most of these knew only vaguely who Karl Rove was.

With Rove’s new conflict value, viewers looked past the president and at him in the background, with the effect of bringing him forward out of the background into new prominence. Interesting to look at a series of images, after the conflict story broke, with Rove directly behind the president’s shoulder, so that he could not help but be seen by cameras that were already looking for him.

After a week of this, the president on national prime-time television, announced his nominee for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor. This was a huge story, maximum for conflict and threat to the status quo, and far more sensational than the C.I.A. identity story. In the Karl Rove conflict, one side saw it as a Bush strategy to deflect attention away from the C.I.A. story, and the other side saw Bush simply taking care of the nation’s business.

The effect was to enhance Rove’s new fame (look what the president would do to protect him) and create a perspective backdrop for it (he’s a fairly small concern in the nation’s business) at the same time. Rove has new fame, but not too much. The Rove story remains in the media, but the Supreme Court story pushes it to the inside pages, or the second half of the news hour.

As an exercise in “reading news,” those are the facts as of this date. Karl Rove is more famous than he was before, but only enough to give him name and face identity to a constituency that in his “old fame” barely knew who he was. The facts position him to resign, which he will do if events are allowed to proceed to a point where the president would feel it expedient to fire him.

It is also a set of facts that presents a teaching point in a scenario, of how the Toolbox is used by professionals to market news. In the scenario, the principals have positioned themselves perfectly. President Bush called Karl Rove “the architect” of his last election victory. Rove’s skills are no longer useful to a president ineligible for re-election. But he has great value as “the architect” for election of a Bush Republican in 2008.

That is work best done outside the White House, in a party leadership role. He is now positioned to resign before he is fired (a win-win for both men), with new fame, and new credibility as a martyr to a cause, that will galvanize even the casual right in his work to come as the architect of Republican victory in 2008. It is a scenario that someone with Rove’s media skills could easily conceive, or kick himself if he didn’t.