Goes To Twelve: Time For A Career Change?

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Time For A Career Change?

Salon provides a test for future reporters:

You -- yes, you! -- can go on the road and be a campaign reporter! But first you must pass the ACTAT -- the Advanced Campaign Trail Aptitude Test.

For the first time, Salon is bringing the secret standardized mainstream-media test to the public, publishing the actual* questions reporters must answer correctly before they can travel with any candidate. This is not a basic news quiz. This is the real deal.* It's hard.

How to take the test: Number a piece of paper 1 to 30, and take the test. Check your answers against the answer key on Page 3. If you get only five to 10 questions right, you qualify as a well-informed citizen. If you get more than 15 right, you may be focusing too much time on politics and not enough on your family. If you get every question right, you can have my job.*
*Just kidding.
...
0-5 correct. Cub. Give it a few years. You are not yet ready for the trail.
6-15 correct. Up-and-comer. Occasional campaign bus rides allowed.
16-25 correct. Trail ready. Head for the Iowa State Fair.
26-30 correct. Top-tier pencil. You are in a select group. Go scoop the New York Times.

I scored 21.

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Alinsky's Rules For Radicals

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Goes To Twelve

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Time For A Career Change?

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