Political Smears and Learning

Both the McCain and Obama camps have gone negative. It must be October.

There's an old line about negative advertising -- people hate it, but it works. Obama "palled around" with domestic terrorists, or so says Sarah Palin. McCain palled around with the guy behind the huge savings and loan scandal many years ago, or so say recent ads. Tonight is yet another debate, and everyone wonders if the McCain and Obama's heels will go on and their gloves come off.

Political smears are old school presidential politics. They have a pedigree stretching back to some of the earliest presidential campaigns. Nothing new, nothing surprising, and we know they can sometimes influence voters.

But do they affect learning?

Yeah, kinda. How's that for a PhDweebish answer? Negative information grabs the attention, breaks through the indifference of some voters, energizes others, and generally can lead to some political learning. Advertising has become a key factor in what people know about a campaign, in part because the ads invade their entertainment programming and are harder to escape than straight news stories.

So tonight, if the heels are on and the gloves are off, we might not only see great political theater, we may have some people learn more than from a wonky policy discussion.

Citizen Journalism and Knowing

Sometimes what people know is wrong.

The journalism field has been abuzz since last week when a citizen journalist posted on CNN's iReport that Apple guru Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. A great version of the problem is here.

This false report affected stocks, got the feds involved. It provides a whipping boy, or case study, (depending on your take) on the idea of citizen journalism.

Bad facts, bad story. But the CNN iReport community did what online communities are supposed to do. According to CNN, "the community brought it to our attention." In other words, real online communities create and maintain their space, they self correct the problems that emerge, or often they shout down the people who are obscene, are trolls, or who are just plain wrong.

So I'm of two minds here. The pro journalist side of me, who has done it for real and who teaches it at a j-school, dislikes the idea of anyone posting to something like CNN without the traditional rules of verification. But the new media realist in me likes the idea of communities maintaining their own space, fixing the problems that emerge.

So what's it all mean for what people know? Ah, here lies the danger. Ideas get lodged in the public mind, even untrue ones. It's damn hard to dislodge those misconceptions and all it takes is one friggin stupid story to do the job.

Sometimes when a thousand citizen journalists bloom, the fertilizer smell is hard to avoid.

Mixed Media

People are skimmers: a little from this medium, a little from that medium, a dash of this and a smidgen of that. There is hard news and soft news. Some rely on the New York Times or NPR, some rely on Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh, but most people take a little of everything to make up their news media diet.

Take this notion and combine it with criticism of how journalists often frame the news as a contest and you get -- best I can tell -- an interesting study like this. The link provides only the abstract, but these are serious folks doing the study and the abstract alone is enough to make me want to find an obscure journal like CyberPsychology and Behavior.

From what I read, they seem to suggest that framing political stories as a game, as competition, or as they call it -- strategically -- appears to help people who use mixed media make sense of the political world, or at least keep "absorbing and learning in a mixed media environment."

As I can't see the whole piece, we'll have to rely on the abstract, but it raises a pretty cool question and point. For some people, stories framed as a competition keeps them engaged, especially if they use a mix of lots of media (and are perhaps less politically involved on a whole). Horse race polls are bad? Perhaps not always. Stories framed as a game trivialize the process? Maybe, but they may also engage people. We know that entertainment-based news like The Daily Show does seem to break through the attention barrier for some folks, though it remains up in the air how much they learn versus how much they think they learn from such programs.

Celebrities and the Election

An interesting story about celebrities and the U.S. election, especially the ones criticizing Sarah Palin's political experience and knowledge.

Do celebrity endorsements, or non-endorsements, really matter? There's not a lot of research on that specific question, but persuasion research suggests these kind of comments affect only those with little interest in the topic. And let's face it, people who don't care, they're not likely to vote anyway.

Plus, does anyone really care what Barbara Streisand thinks? Or Britney Spears?

Matt Damon's youtube bit on Sarah Palin, presented below as an example.

The VP Debate

First, the who won. A CBS poll of uncommitted voters gave Joe Biden the edge, 42-21 percent, over Sarah Palin. A CNN poll of regular voters looks about the same, 51-36 percent thinking Biden won. And he did, by any objective, non-partisan analysis.

In Palin's favor, no stumbles other than a creepy wink thing (see video below). Eighty-four percent said the Alaska governor did better than they expected. Something, then, for everyone. I thought at times she shined, at times she repeated the mantra. To stand toe-to-toe with an experienced guy like Biden, not bad.


And though I bitched a little (see below) about the moderator Ifill and her book, 95 percent polled thought she was fair. And she was.

The Fox folks this morning insisted Palin won. I think they watched their TVs with the sound off.

What We Know, about VPs

Joe Biden and Sarah Palin do the VPFaceoff at 9 p.m. EST on various TV channels. You know the mantra: Biden's gotta be careful not to be condescending, Palin's gotta look smarter than she appeared on earlier interviews, the moderator is writing a book with a chapter on Obama, so she's suspect.

A word on the Gwen Ifill book on blacks in politics thing. The PBSer should have told the debate commission she was writing the book -- any reasonable journalist would instantly recognize this as a potential problem and bow out, but I guess it's something you can't pass up. Stupid stupid TV people, hungry for one more minute in front of the camera. Sheesh. Not that I think the book is a real conflict or she can't rise above it, but something they never seem to get is the appearance of conflict. That's all that's needed out there in the weird wild blogosphere.

Stupid stupid TV people.

So what we know about Sarah Palin, in particular, will be formed in the American mind tonight. For her supporters, they hope she keeps it simple, earthy, and doesn't ramble incoherently. I'm guessing she'll do fine.

Plus, the VP debate rarely matters. Even Dan Quayle getting ripped in his 1988 VP debate couldn't sink Bush Sr.'s presidential run, so if Palin stumbles I don't think it'll matter all that much. Obama has the momentum, so to me the pressure is on Biden not to screw that up, but even if he does I don't think it'll matter.

Let's face it. We're watching for the theater of the moment. Waiting for the crash.

Likely Voters

If you read polls closely, you'll see some are of "adults," some are of "likely voters." So how do you decide which one is likely, which one is not? And why does it matter?

Filtering out the likely from the unlikely has some art, some science, and a whole lot of educated guesswork by pros who do this for a living. And even they don't agree on how to weigh this factor versus that factor. A recent story by Rob Daves lays this out much better than I could ever do. I recommend you click that mouse and check it out if you ever wondered about presidential trial heats, why some differ from others, and what the hell is a likely voter. As Daves writes:

Pollsters use different "likely voter" models and those who have been around the block a few times keep track of how their models perform in various elections. They use some for high-turnout elections; some for low. Some use screens to eliminate unlikely voters. Some weight all respondents, counting likely voters' responses more and those less likely to vote less. There's no industry standard "right way" to model a likely electorate, and virtually all pollsters have their favorite method.

Okay, fine. Different screening and filtering methods, different ingredients in that witch's brew, and you get differing results. This matters, especially if you buy the notion of polls and a bandwagon effect.

What people know about a campaign comes in part from the polls they consume. There's a great definition of public opinion that I'll use again and again: "Public opinion is no more than this, what people think other people think." This is from a play called Prince Lucifer and qualifies as my obscure reference of the day (we academics get points for this). If you look carefully at the trial heat polls on pollingreport.com, you'll see some are registered voters, some are likely voters. That will help you to understand, at least in part, some of the odd differences.