During the political season, whisper campaigns are used to frame narratives about political opponents. They are often as rumors to discourage voters from supporting a candidate. Whisper campaigns are not usually traced to a campaign, although the campaigns benefiting from a whisper campaign are either tacitly – if indirectly – supporting it or are directly behind it without admitting it to the voters. A whisper campaign is a rumor, sometimes based on events taken out of context or, often, is a fabrication used to damage a candidate’s reputation.
Dirty political tricks go back to when candidates started competing for the attention of the voters. In American politics, the 1828 presidential election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson is considered one of the dirtiest campaigns in history.
The animosity between the two contenders was fueled by a controversial letter in the previous election.
The “corrupt bargain” as the event is known involved an anonymous letter accusing Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, of conspiring to give the presidential office to John Quincy Adams after none of the four major candidates had won enough electoral votes to win, forcing the House to pick the winner.
The anonymous letter was printed in the Columbian Observer shortly before the House members were to pick the next president. Initially an individual took credit for the anonymous letter, but later refused to prove the conspiracy described in it. Although the letter’s conspiracy or its author were not proven, its ramifications detrimentally influenced the political future of Clay and led Americans to wonder how corrupt the Adams Administration was.
The corrupt bargain letter is likely the first example of a whisper campaign in American politics.
What Is A Whisper Campaign?
It is important to understand that whisper campaigns are not the same as negative campaigning that use attacks or contrasting advertisements. Negative campaigning is based on truthful statements whereas whisper campaigns are lies.
Two recent examples showing the difference between the two are a 1988 George H.W. Bush advertisement about Willi Horton and the pizza gate conspiracy.
The Bush advertisement targeting Michael Dukakis on crime is an example of negative campaigning because the contents are truthful, if unflattering to the candidate, and racist. A whisper campaign, on the other hand, is based on a lie, like “pizza gate.”
To this day, although it has been proven to be a lie, many people believe that officials of the Democratic Party operate a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant. The conspiracy started out as a conspiracy theory shared through social media among fringe groups that went viral after a Turkish media outlet trended the conspiracy to help in on related geopolitical events involving Turkey. Mike Cernovich, a right-wing social media personality, is credited with massively pushing the debunked pizza gate theory into the mainstream media through social media.
Based on a fabrication and trended by political operatives, today there are many who believe the lie of pizza gate. Pizza gate is an example of a whisper campaign that many believe although it is a lie.
Whisper Campaigns In El Paso
The first instance of a whisper campaign in El Paso was in 1927. The political topics of the day were politicians that “thrust bond issues on citizens when this could not be afforded,” and what R. E. Thomason asserted was that “El Paso was a boss-ridden, tax-ridden town,” that hampered the city’s ability to be like Dallas, Houston or Albuquerque.
“Christened with spatterings of mud, oozing vindictiveness, Thomason and his running mates launched forth last night on the stormy political waters,” started the El Paso Times January 18, 1927 article about the political campaign of Charles Davis. Thomason accused the Davis campaign of “waging a ‘whispering’ campaign.” According to Thomason, Davis started the whisper campaign against him by accusing Thomason of wanting to reduce teacher pay and of not liking Mexicans. Thomason denied the accusations as lies by supporters of the Davis campaign. The reason for the whisper campaign against him, asserted Thomason, was that he believed El Paso “has practically reached the limit of taxation.”
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The back-and-forth accusations of whisper campaigning between the Davis and Thomason campaigns went on for several days on the pages of the El Paso Herald Post and the El Paso Times in the form of articles in 1927 and 1928.
It wasn’t just the El Pasoans accusing each other of whisper campaigns – both local newspapers included stories of accusations of whisper campaigns against Herbert Hoover. But it wasn’t just the politicians.
Businesses Game The Whisper Campaign Controversies
The “whispering campaign” articles dominated the newspapers’ pages so much that a chiropractor, O. Boone Morgan, took out a newspaper advertisement in the El Paso Evening Post on October 12, 1928 that proclaimed that he states “boldly, and positively” that he “will not be indulged” in whisper campaigns, ending his proclamation with, “yes, I make home calls.” The department store, The White House, also took out an advertisement in the El Paso Herald on October 26, 1928 with the headline “Not a Whispering Campaign,” asking readers to stay tune to the semi-annual sale they had planned for the following Sunday’s paper.
Lucky Strikes, a cigarette brand, got into the whispering campaign advertising gimmick by running an advertisement on the May 7, 1929 in and issue of the El Paso Times with the headline, “No ‘Whispering Campaign’…” before explaining why the cigarette brand was the better choice.
In 1932, the whisper campaigns in El Paso were still making the newspaper pages but this time it was a local newspaper accusing banks and county officials of launching whisper campaigns against it. In a June 15, 1932, the El Paso Herald Post carried an editor’s editorial where they accused county politicians, First Mortgage Co. and First National Bank of telling people that the newspaper’s editor was “wrecking El Paso’s good name” because “he wants to be a dictator – a political boss.” The paper was also accused of not paying taxes. The paper’s editorial denied both charges. The paper had recently published articles about high taxes and banks abusing residents.
One candidate for constable in the Democratic primary runoff in 1932, answered a whisper campaign against him being made by individuals in the Five Points neighborhood by asking the Army to officially confirm he was honorably discharged from the army. Candidate Daniel B. Brungardt showed a telegram from Washington stating that he was honorably discharged from Ft. Bliss.
It wasn’t just politicians being targeted by whisper campaigns. Before the controversies over Russia and Donald Trump, soviet operatives were accused of trying to undermine El Paso’s banking system.
Soviet Union, Now Russia, Accused In El Paso Of Whisper Campaigning
In addition to the politicians being targeted by whisper campaigns in 1932, a group of people supporting Russia, then the Soviet Union, caused citizens in El Paso to be warned that “red bank-wreckers” were operating in El Paso. El Paso’s citizens were warned to ignore “anonymous telephone calls or unsigned letters questioning the stability of the banks.” According to the newspaper report alerting the community, communists were “plotting to destroy our government by throwing the people into panic and destroying the banks.”
Notwithstanding the communist attack on the banks, whisper campaigns in El Paso against candidates for office still filled the local newspapers through the 1950’s. In 1958, the El Paso Council of Churches requested that “there be no whispering campaigns or scurrilous attack” on political candidates in the local races.
But the use of whisper campaigns did not end even with the appeal of the church group. In 1968 commissioner Clyde Anderson dismissed complaints by his opponent, Emmett Larkin, that Anderson was behind a whisper campaign targeting Larkin, calling the allegation “his imaginary whisper campaign.”
Although by the early 1970’s the use of whisper campaigns in local races started to drop, at least on the pages of the local newspapers, there were several that occasionally appeared. Radio had started taking over the preferred medium to spread the political rumors to the voters.
In 1982, Woodrow Bean II was accused of using “insinuations” against his opponent’s visit to a doctor two years before the election. Herb Marsh admitted to the doctor’s visit “for some tension headaches,” that he argued it did not affect his ability to work. In 1986, Project Bravo Director Irving Gray accused Karen Devine, Head Start Director, of starting a whisper campaign “to undermine” him.
By 1993, the whisper campaigns had largely left the newspaper pages and instead used talk radio programs as launching pads targeting certain politicians. Carlos Ramirez, who was running for mayor against Larry Francis was accused of wanting to be the mayor of Juárez because he wasn’t “El Pasoan enough.” Ramirez’ childhood was spent in El Paso’s sister city.
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In 2001, the KROD radio program Balk Talk with Paul Strelzin became the center of political whisper campaigns in El Paso. When Strelzin was accused of providing a platform to Ray Caballero for “character assassination,” Strelzin replied that equal time did not apply to radio talk shows, adding that the truth was not required on the show, because in Brooklyn, where he was from, “people bloodied each other and then shook hands afterward.”
Strelzin later acknowledged that providing Caballero access to his show came after Caballero loaned him money for his daughter’s wedding without expecting to be repaid.
Many of the callers to Strelzin’s show used talking points about political candidates that were used as whisper campaigns against targeted political candidates.
In 2018, state representative, Mary González, the first openly LGBTQ candidate to be elected, complained that “the hardest part for me, to be honest, was the way in which my sexuality was used to dehumanize me,” by the whisper campaigns launched against her that “she’s not one of us, she’s not like us.”
Because of the anonymous nature of spreading of rumors, it has been difficult for political candidates to hold accountable those responsible for starting the whisper campaigns against them. However, sources of whisper campaigns in El Paso have been occasionally exposed. Strelzin, for example, had to admit to a loan from Caballero in a deposition from a lawsuit filed against him.
Whisper Campaigns Today
Usually, a whisper campaign cannot be sourced to a specific individual or a campaign but as it gains traction it will get the news media’s attention where it sometimes becomes a news item. In recent decades the preferred outlet for starting a whisper campaign was radio talk show programs and then the internet through discussion forums, blogs and now digital news sites supporting specific political agendas. An effective medium for whisper campaigns is social media where a rumor can go viral in seconds. Emails continue to be effectively used.
Emails and social media are effective because people tend to trust their family and friends. When they receive an email with a whisper campaign, they tend to believe it because they trust the sender. To this day, although it has been debunked, many Americans still believe that Barack Obama is a “radical Muslim.”
Today’s social media works similarly in that consumers will tend to believe anything shared by a friend or family member. Polling is another method of influencing the electorate through the wording in a poll’s question.
Push Polling Whisper Campaigns
Another tactic used to create whisper campaigns is push polls. Normally a poll of voters taken during an election is used to gather information about how voters may vote in upcoming elections. A push poll, on the other hand, is used as a tool to push a rumor to the electorate before the election. In the 2000 presidential election, a push poll was sent to voters before the South Carolina primary asking if a voter would still vote for John McCain “if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”
The child referenced in the push poll was McCain’s daughter from Bangladesh that he had adopted. Although McCain was expected to win the primary he lost to George W. Bush, 53% to 42%.
That was not the only whisper campaign McCain faced while running for office as another whisper campaign accused him of being a traitor while a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
However, McCain himself, benefited from a whisper campaign accusing Obama of being a “radical Muslim” in 2008.
The internet has become the central point for whisper campaigns with the demise of talk radio. The use of social media and other digital platforms has become the place voters go to get their news about elections.
Recent El Paso Examples
El Paso’s most notorious purveyor of whisper campaigns is likely blogger Jaime Abeytia who used his blog as the launch point for many of the whisper campaigns in recent years, until his platform was abruptly shut down for his continuous violations of its terms of service.
So notorious was Abeytia’s blog for whisper campaigns that one needed only to read its posts to know who was being targeted in the latest whisper campaigns. Two of the most recent whisper campaigns peddled by Abeytia were a divorce decree he peddled in 2022 rumoring that the mayor had pulled the story from the airwaves, and a 2014 whisper campaign where he insinuated that Carl Robinson was too sick to run for office in 2021.
Along with Abeytia two other bloggers, David Karlruher and Ali Razavi used their platforms for whisper campaigns starting around 2012 until they stopped blogging.
El Paso Matters
The latest source of whisper campaigns is Bob Moore’s El Paso Matters as alleged in two FCC complaints filed against it recently.
In 2022 we detailed step-by-step how Bob Moore first used the Texas Monthly to start a whisper campaign against political consultant Carlos Sierra in 2018 and, apparently, because the whisper campaign did not cause Sierra to lose political business, Moore followed up in 2022 with another article.
Both whisper campaigns masked as journalistic articles involved a PAC who the Federal Election Commission (FEC) declined to act on. El Paso Matters, however, in the article penned by Bob Moore used crafted language designed to insinuate a corruption that the record did not support and quoted an individual without clearly disclosing to its readers that he is the director of the agency that filed one of the complaints with the FEC. The other individual quoted by Moore that used language like, “illegal” to characterize the PAC’s activities is the campaign manager of the party that was aggrieved by the PAC, Veronica Escobar.
The PAC whisper campaign lies in that it insinuates a corruption that the investigating agency did not prove.
Most recently, El Paso Matters added a sentence to one of its political articles that was proved false. The sentence appears to have been added for no other apparent reason than to create fuel for search engine optimization (SEO) and create a false political historical record. Because the falsehood was added months after the issue without a normal disclaimer that the article had been updated, it can only be surmised that the additional false sentence was added for political purposes. El Paso Matters has since corrected the article with a note, leaving open to interpretation the intended reason the falsehood was added to a story that had long passed.
The Future of Whisper Campaigns
El Paso Matters has been shown to decimate articles that can be construed as whisper campaigns. At least two FCC reports allege it. But El Paso Matters is only one source for today’s whisper campaigns in El Paso. Facebook and its sister platform have become prolific sources of political discourse in El Paso and thus are likely to be used as platforms for the whisper campaigns that will start to rise in the upcoming November 5 elections.
Although social media and email will continue to be the conduits for whisper campaigns there are new insidious digital tools that are starting to make a mark in American politics – artificial intelligence (AI) and deep fakes. These tools are starting to have political candidates appear to acknowledge rumors about themselves through doctored videos (deep fakes) appearing to confirm the rumors.
Already at least two deep fake videos of Kamala Harris have surfaced. One shows Harris repeating herself – which she did not – and another shows her calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire.” Both fake videos are doctored videos showing candidates doing or same something that is not true.
The other tool, artificial intelligence (AI), will likely be misused to rapidly spread disinformation to feed whisper campaigns in the upcoming elections.