For Those So Inclined

An extended discussion of Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," the heart of tomorrow's readings and discussion, is available through E-Journals: go to the Winter 2006 issue of Critical Review. If pressed for time, take a look at Converse's Reply to the critics, "Democratic Theory and Electoral Reality."

More on Glittering Generalities

Blame the Media? Continued

Boehlert:

Instead of recoiling, the Republican ticket seems to have adopted a post-press approach to campaigning in which the candidates simply don't care what the press does or says about their honesty. More to the point, the candidates don't think it will matter on Election Day.

They may be right. And that's the media's fault. They've reported their way right into the margins. Submerged in trivia and tactics for the past 18 months, the press, I think, has damaged its ability -- its authority -- to referee the campaign.

Blame the Media?

From Ezra Klein:

Earlier this year McCain made poverty tours and offered policy speeches. No one cared, Obama retained his lead. It was only when he began offering vicious attacks and daily controversies that he began setting the pace of the coverage. The McCain campaign learned something important about the media: It's an institution that covers conflict. If you want to direct its coverage, give it more conflict than your opponent. And so they have.

Riffing on the Swift Boaters

Serendipidy

The Washington Post highlights some of the research I mentioned today -- it's harder to get someone to unlearn something false than to learn it. And an effort to correct the misperception can, instead, reinforce it. Why lie in a campaign ad? This is part of the answer.

Jackson and Jamieson: Unspun

Below you'll find a list of their "Warning Signs" from Chapter 2, and "Tricks" from Chapter 3, and my offerings of an example here and there (or, if I'm trying to be sneaky, a counter-example. . . .), to get us started. If you can offer missing examples (video clips, or quotes from and links to articles), add your suggestions in Comments and I'll update the post. And perhaps if you'd like, use your own blogs to explore the issues raised in the rest of the book, or keep at it with the nice critiques of Outfoxed, or reflect upon what Jackson and Jamieson can offer as help for making sense of the current campaign. Below I've also listed Jackson and Jamieson's "Lessons" and "Rules," which we'll discuss this week as well.

WARNINGS

If it's Scary, Be Wary





A Story That's Too Good



The Dangling Comparative



The Superlatives Swindle


The 'Pay You Tuesday' Con


The Blame Game

"President George W. Bush is blaming the Democratic-led Congress for the high cost of gasoline."
"As Gas Prices Rise Again, Democrats Blame Big Oil"

Glittering Generalities




TRICKS

Misnomers

The Clear Skies Initiative

Frame it and Claim it

The Death Tax

Weasel Words


Eye Candy



The 'Average' Bear

FactCheck.org: "Here We Go Again: Bush Exaggerates Tax Cuts"

The Baseline Bluff

Bush rejected the notion that he was cutting Medicare, saying his proposals would allow it to grow, just not as fast. "People call it a cut in Medicare," he told a business group here. "That's not a cut. It's slowing down the rate of growth. It's the difference between slowing your car down to go the speed limit or putting your car in reverse."

The Literally True Falsehood





The Implied Falsehood



LESSONS

The plural of anecdote is not data
Remember the blind man and the elephant
Not all studies are equal
Saying it doesn't make it so
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence

RULES

You can't be completely certain
You can be certain enough
Look for general agreement among experts
Check primary sources
Know what counts
Know who's talking
Seeing something shouldn't necessarily be believing
Cross-check everything that matters
Be skeptical, but not cynical

Speech Wars

More interesting text analysis tools.

UItterly, Completely and Totally

off point. But my candidate for best Onion article ever.

On Nixonland

A nice meditation on the main theme of Rick Perlstein's new book, but I want to draw your attention to the comments. Some exceptions, to be sure, but notice the smart, engaged, and engaging dialogue in the comment thread.

Well, There You Have It

From Business Week via The Monkey Cage.

Department of Irony Department

FactCheck.org fact-checks campaign ad citing a FactCheck.org fact-check.

Grains of Salt

THIS (click and scroll down) is an online poll, so it's hampered by that. But in this case not quite so badly, since it's an online survey that can tell us something about the self-reported political activism of active blog readers/posters/diarists. . . . . Notice that it suggest evidence at odds with Grant Reeher's claims.

Following Up

Thinking back upon our discussion in class tonight, it occurs to me that I probably didn't clearly articulate the larger point I wanted to make about the readings under review. Let me try here.

We know that media matters. We know that audiences are fragmenting. We know that our own biases frame our interpretation of events. We are reasonably sure that television has its own particular effects upon perception, and probably upon political behavior. We know (or very strongly suspect) than online communication has effects upon the acquisition of knowledge, the distribution of that knowledge among the population, and probably upon political behavior and participation. What we don't yet know with anything approaching certainty, or even satisfaction, is what those effects are, and how they vary from person to person, from group to group.

The challenge for us is to critically evaluate the scholarship that has been done on these topics, to reconcile competing or contradictory findings, to try to build upon that knowledge ourselves.

That's still not quite it, but I'll/we'll continue noodling with this.

Because Nobody Reads Enough Weber Anymore

from Politics as a Vocation:

Within the limits of this lecture, it is quite impossible even to sketch the sociology of modern political journalism, which in every respect constitutes a chapter in itself. Certainly, only a few things concerning it are in place here. In common with all demagogues and, by the way, with the lawyer (and the artist), the journalist shares the fate of lacking a fixed social classification. At least, this is the case on the Continent, in contrast to the English, and, by the way, also to former conditions in Prussia. The journalist belongs to a sort of pariah caste, which is always estimated by 'society' in terms of its ethically lowest representative. Hence, the strangest notions about journalists and their work are abroad. Not everybody realizes that a really good journalistic accomplishment requires at least as much 'genius' as any scholarly accomplishment, especially because of the necessity of producing at once and 'on order,' and because of the necessity of being effective, to be sure, under quite different conditions of production. It is almost never acknowledged that the responsibility of the journalist is far greater, and that the sense of responsibility of every honorable journalist is, on the average, not a bit lower than that of the scholar, but rather, as the war has shown, higher. This is because, in the very nature of the case, irresponsible journalistic accomplishments and their often terrible effects are remembered.

How to Call Your Opponent Old Without Calling Your Opponent Old?

Reversible Raincoats, Antimetabole, and Chiasmus

Campaign rhetoric.

Stealing from Ezra in Bulk

This is good:

I think one aspect of the modern press that doesn't get enough attention -- either among folks in the media or folks critiquing it -- is the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation. For instance, the attitude on display in this Marc Ambinder post is fully understandable if you take a newspaperman's attitude towards the whole thing. If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to. It's sort of like a TV show: If Friends had had an episode where Ross and Rachel hooked up, but never mentioned it again, that would've been weird, but their tryst wouldn't have been a big part of the story. Since they mentioned it all the time, and came back to it, and fit future events into that context, it was a big story. Similarly, if the press reports something and never mentions it again, the public knows to forget it. It's not important. If they mention it constantly -- "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- they know it is important. The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story.

This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it's important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn't stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that's also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

It also gives rise to a more fundamental incoherence at the center of contemporary campaign reporting: Ambinder waves this media conversation away as a "Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press" because he thinks of all this as media criticism. But this isn't about the press, it's about the campaign. And he's the guy we all look to for that type of coverage. His job is to report on the motivations and actions and effects of the major political players in the election (and he's among the best at it). But there is arguably no political player as important in the election as the aggregate media. But the media won't report on itself. Which means they can't really report on the campaign: They can only report on the campaign-minus-the-media, which is an impossible thing to do, and requires them to invent all sorts of explanations for how the things that they're doing are happening. This tends to take the form of an imaginary median voter whose interests and opinions they imagine are driving their coverage and who is thus the real actor in the election, but it makes everything extremely meta, erodes any measure of accountability, and demands that a lot of coverage present itself as willfully obtuse.

A Goodman Follow Up

part of the reason why the U.S. Press Freedom ranking is not higher?

Just in Case. . . .

. . . .you don't have enough to read (hey -- I heard that!): from the Pew Research Center for the Preople and the Press, some data to complement what you have. Key Tables below.