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.

新闻工作者都害惧怕 silly season——正如我从前解释过的，silly season是指夏天没有甚么新闻的「无聊季节」，因为政治领袖和一般人都在放假。传媒不时会用一些无关重要（trivial）的新闻去充斥报章版面和电视新闻节目。Silly season有时亦会被称为「青瓜季节」（cucumber season），因为没有重要的新闻可报道，意味着媒体必须连青瓜收成这种琐碎（trivial）的事情也得报道。新闻编辑同样不喜欢新闻太多，他们没有人手去报道所有的事情，必须取舍报道甚么而忽视甚么。要是有太多新闻，人们亦不会事事关注。

这就导致人们难以反对那些他们不喜欢的政治决定。制造过多的新闻给传媒和人们去消化，叫做 flooding the zone。史提芬‧班农，就是唐纳德‧特朗普第一任期当总统时的首席策略长，于2018年发明了这个词语。他说特朗普身为共和党人，需要「讯息淹没战术」（flood the zone），以连绵的新闻去把民主党人弄糊涂，以及淹过那些反对的声音。特朗普第二次当总统以来刚好一个月，但他已经在打「淹没战术」（flooding the zone），新闻多得足以盖过民主党人的众多反对声音。

他曾威胁要购买和殖民格陵兰、夺下巴拿马运河，以及令加拿大变成美国的第51个州。他亦要求世界首富伊隆‧马斯克去全面整顿联邦政府。马斯克已炒掉数以千计的联邦雇员。这样用一连串重磅新闻去做「讯息淹没」（flooding the zone），已令传媒顾此失彼，难以充分报道民主党人的反对声音。

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Michael Chugani褚简宁
中译：七刻