又中又英｜Flooding the zone

Journalists dread the silly season. As I have explained before, the silly season refers to summer when there is very little news because political leaders and ordinary people are on vacation. The media often use trivial (unimportant) news to fill newspapers and TV news shows. The silly season is sometimes called the cucumber season because the lack of important news means media outlets must cover trivial things like cucumber harvests. News editors also dislike too much news. They don’t have the manpower to cover everything and must decide what to cover and what to ignore. People also lose attention when there is too much news.

This makes it difficult for them to oppose political decisions they dislike. Creating too much news for the media and the people to digest is called flooding the zone. Steve Bannon, a political strategist for Donald Trump during his first term as US president, invented the expression in 2018. He said Trump, a Republican, needed to flood the zone with continuous news to confuse the Democrats and to drown out opposing voices. It has been just one month since Trump became president for a second term, but he is already flooding the zone with so much news that it’s drowning out the opposing voices of the Democrats.

He has threatened to buy and colonize Greenland, take over the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state of the US. He has also asked Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to overhaul the federal government. Musk has fired thousands of federal workers. This flooding the zone with big news has made it difficult for the media to adequately cover the opposing voices of the Democrats.

新聞工作者都害懼怕 silly season——正如我從前解釋過的，silly season是指夏天沒有甚麼新聞的「無聊季節」，因為政治領袖和一般人都在放假。傳媒不時會用一些無關重要（trivial）的新聞去充斥報章版面和電視新聞節目。Silly season有時亦會被稱為「青瓜季節」（cucumber season），因為沒有重要的新聞可報道，意味着媒體必須連青瓜收成這種瑣碎（trivial）的事情也得報道。新聞編輯同樣不喜歡新聞太多，他們沒有人手去報道所有的事情，必須取捨報道甚麼而忽視甚麼。要是有太多新聞，人們亦不會事事關注。

這就導致人們難以反對那些他們不喜歡的政治決定。製造過多的新聞給傳媒和人們去消化，叫做 flooding the zone。史提芬‧班農，就是唐納德‧特朗普第一任期當總統時的首席策略長，於2018年發明了這個詞語。他說特朗普身為共和黨人，需要「訊息淹沒戰術」（flood the zone），以連綿的新聞去把民主黨人弄糊塗，以及淹過那些反對的聲音。特朗普第二次當總統以來剛好一個月，但他已經在打「淹沒戰術」（flooding the zone），新聞多得足以蓋過民主黨人的眾多反對聲音。

他曾威脅要購買和殖民格陵蘭、奪下巴拿馬運河，以及令加拿大變成美國的第51個州。他亦要求世界首富伊隆‧馬斯克去全面整頓聯邦政府。馬斯克已炒掉數以千計的聯邦僱員。這樣用一連串重磅新聞去做「訊息淹沒」（flooding the zone），已令傳媒顧此失彼，難以充分報道民主黨人的反對聲音。

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Michael Chugani褚簡寧
中譯：七刻