Professors and Technology

Not about political communication but relevant to the class...?  I would amend this by adding that 1=Student who finally comes up to help, as we've seen in our class this semester!

“Shut up, press!” said the dictatorship…

Recently we had a class about the relationship between media and politics and this made me think about the situations of countries that lived under authoritarian regimes. I am Brazilian, but you who is reading this blog is probably a north American, so you didn’t live a dictatorship. However this sad reality is pretty close to me. What changes do this authoritarian context causes? What are the ghosts of these years that still scare Brazilian population? How does it help us to handle with present day situations and polemics?

First of all, a little bit of history: Brazil lived under a military dictatorship from 1964 until 1985, the year that our democracy really started. Yes, we have just 27 years of democracy! Definitely we made a lot of advances, especially in terms of electoral process, in which we are pointed as one of the most developed  of the world (voting is mandatory from 18 until 65 years old and it happens through electronic ballot box).

Nevertheless during dictatorship times the press was oppressed and all the contemporary theories suffered some alterations, once that the intervenient element of governmental censorship was introduced. Diffusion of information and Uses of gratification theory had the Government selection of information between the media and the public to make sure that no opposition message will reach the mass public and every favorable information will reach them. Agenda setting and Political Watch Dog is completely diminished annulated, once that the control of media release of informations are at State hands. By the other side, the politicians have a strong control over media and the information that it releases, what reinforces the aspect of control of flow information, introduced at the last Thursday class. This is fundamental to maintain the mass public under control and to keep the opposite forces in silence. This is the changes made media become just an instrument in countries under dictatorship, but who thinks that this is a reality locked at our past history is making a huge mistake.

Until nowadays we live with some ghosts overhead of 140 missing people. Moreover, Brazilian State until now keeps some file in secret status, I mean doesn’t open for public knowledge, files that could charge those responsible for torture and murder practice or, at least, bring some peace to the families that don’t know what happened to their relatives. On this struggle the National Comission of Truth (CNV – Comissão Nacional da Verdade) was created on 2011 and has the mission of making clear all the violations of human rights that happened between 1946 to 1988, including the murders, tortures and disappearance of people.

Back to media theme: who thinks that this discussion doesn’t apply for nowadays is making a huge mistake. What about the countries that today live under a non-democratic regime? Isn’t against this type of regime that US fight at Middle East? Why do people of these countries supports so hard a regime that doesn’t aims people’s wishes anymore? Understanding the media reality in dictatorships from the past can help us to understand the present day conflicts, especially in theocracies and authoritarian States.

In Iran the media is controlled by a Special Court, the Islamic Revolutionary Court, created in 1979 and the news, TV or pressed in regulated for this Court, which works with the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), already in activity since 1934. Syria media also suffer censorship, like showed here. In Sudan the means to control the press are getting better, like showed on this article  what isn’t a good thing. In face of this reality how can media deliver the information? How do people get the information, make its own judgment? How can they fight if they don’t know what is going on?

          Dictatorships are one the worst things to damage a people and a country, once that the first thing that they do is to eliminate the channels of communication between them. Sudan, Syria, Iran, Lybia and others suffers with this censorship. Had you ever stop to think about this “breaking silence” fight? How hard can be to say “No, I won’t shut up, dictatorship!”? 

I Can See Russia From My House.

If there is one thing Americans remember about 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it is that she could see Russia from her Alaskan home. But could she really? Impersonator Tina Fey incorporated the quote, "I can see Russia from my house." in a political skit on NBC's Saturday Night Live during the presidential race.  Sarah Palin never even muttered these words. A convincing actress, Fey spent the election period portraying the look-alike vice presidential candidate Palin and convincing the American public of her faux and,  at times, idiotic personality. Through Fey's sketch comedy skits, Americans were fully introduced to the otherwise unknown Sarah Palin. However, many voters confused Fey's convincing portrayals of Palin with Palin herself. The lines between entertainment and politics were blurred and melded into a Tina Palin sort of vice presidential candidate. 

Whether or not Saturday Night Live's infamous political skits have any impact on presidential campaigns is a highly contested topic. These political skits have been airing on prime time television since 1976, but the trend of alternative and entertaining news sources may be increasing the influence of such forms of political communication. Candidates know and acknowledge the high viewership of primetime entertainment shows and recently been openly appearing on these shows to represent their celebrity selves. For example, President Obama appeared on SNL, the Letterman Show, etc. However, whether candidate impersonators have any influence on the public's perception and attraction toward specific candidates has not been agreed upon as you can tell from this article. 

In this article, University of Missouri professor William Homer affirms the impact of SNL political skits. He has found enough evidence of influential skits that he has compiled an entire book to record specific instances of influence. Homer rates the previous election as the second most influential by Saturday Night Live and predicts that the 2012 election skits will not reach the level of influence we saw in the last election. 

I agree with Homer that SNL political skits have an impact on the voter population. The talented impersonators clue in to personal habits and ticks of the candidates and expand on them to make them noticable to viewers not only when they are watching the skits, but also when they see the actual candidate in any news, debate, or rally coverage. Additionally, the topics and statements made in the skits are a way of agenda-setting. SNL tells us what to notice about the candidates, what characteristics of their personalities matter, and what they "really think". Some voters cannot stand the infiltration of politics during election years and absorb political knowledge and events only through entertainment shows like SNL. For these voters, the sketch comedy skits are especially persuasive as their news is filtered through laughs and distortions of reality and personality. 

SNL did another skit featuring the vice presidential candidates this year (click here). I don't think this skit will have nearly the memorability or impact the Palin/Clinton skit did. For one, the similarity in looks is not there. Whereas Tina Fey and Sarah Palin were eerily similar looking, neither of these impersonators look like the vice presidential candidates. For another, the uniqueness of the female v. female politician skit lent memorability to the 2008 skit. Finally, many of the stereotypical female politician ideas were harped on in the 2008 skit to deliver the language expectations political audiences were not getting from the candidates themselves. I didn't find as obvious of stereotypes in this year's skit. Unfortunately, stereotypes are memorable and, probably even more unfortunately, our children's children will forever think Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house. 

Talk Radio and Women

Here is a a collection of reactions from women commentators about talk radio.  The article title assumes as established that women in general do not like political talk radio.  I don't know if that's supported by data or not.  However, since it does touch on one of our core themes of women as political communicators, I thought I would post it.  Feel free to comment here or use as a topic for a post of your own.

Oh, Sandy! How a Superstorm Might Affect the Election

Hurricane Sandy is doing more than just tearing up the East Coast. The "Frankenstorm" is also affecting the presidential election at hand, with just about a week left until showtime. According to an article on CNN found here, “Obama administration officials have stressed that they are being proactive in ensuring the Federal Emergency Management Agency is ready to aid the millions of people who will are likely to be affected by the huge storm bearing down on the East Coast.” Being proactive, to the Obama administration, also means pulling back from the campaign trail, which is just what Barack Obama did this Monday, October 29, 2012.

Mitt Romney has been inching up in the election polls lately, pulling slightly ahead of Obama according to a few sources. Some people believe that Obama pulled out of scheduled campaign events in Florida and Virginia and returned to Washington in order to “beef up” his image as president. Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, talks a bit about this in the above mentioned article, saying: “As voters, particularly those who are undecided, deliberate over whom they should support, they will watch Obama as he navigates through the storm and the post-storm clean-up. The crisis offers an opportunity for him to act presidential in a way for which some voters are thirsting and to demonstrate the kind of command that has often been lacking."

In contrast to this point of view, there are others who believe that Obama’s return to Washington and postponing of his political events communicates a different, negative message. Former GOP presidential candidate and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in the CNN article, "You notice that he's canceling his trips over the hurricane. He didn't cancel his trips over Benghazi,” essentially dissing the president for not putting his concerns in the right places.

Another article written by the Denver Post, found here, talks about the negative reaction to George W. Bush and his delayed response to Hurricane Katrina. The article deems that, “If Obama is perceived as a strong leader who shows command in a crisis, some undecided voters might be compelled to back the president. But a botched response or a sense that he's putting politics over public safety could weaken his support at a point in the race where there's little chance to reverse course.”

As a voter myself, I tried to put myself directly into the situation: if I were on the edge about which candidate to vote for, would Hurricane Sandy and the candidate’s reactions to it affect my decision? For me, if Obama acted in a way I didn’t think was fit for the situation, it definitely might turn me off from him. Then, in Romney’s situation, he is only a candidate at this point. Therefore, all he can really do is express concern for the citizens of the U.S. in the path of the storm.   

The presidential candidate’s reactions to something that is a buzzword across the nation is clearly a large part of their political communication. Romney and Obama’s reactions to this storm could make it or break it for some voters, but we won’t really know until the final vote is tallied. I suppose since I’ve been following this election all along and have put quite a bit of energy into it (AKA I’m not a last minute voter), Sandy cannot have any affect on me…but for others, she is quite the wildcard.

While I was reading up on this issue, it struck me that this might be agenda setting: the media telling us not what to think, necessarily, but what to think about. It is really going to be distracting for some people thinking about the hurricane in relation to the election, rather than focusing on the election itself and the values of the candidates. In the long run, though, maybe that’s what agenda setting is meant to do, and in this case the media might be attempting to cause uproar as far as votes are concerned. The actions of the candidate’s in relation to Sandy are certainly important, but should that communication affect an entire election? In my opinion…no, they should not.

We will see if Sandy can start a political storm, rather than the one she already has created!

Debate Unit Odds and Ends

As promised, here is the memorandum of understanding about the debates, as negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns.

Here is a blog post by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post in which she takes a crack at ideas for  debate reform.  Note her idea of "text-based debating" and, as we talked about in class today, a "halftime" during which fact-checking could be done and then announced to the viewers.

From Binders to Bayonets: The Power of Social Media in the 2012 Election

From trending topics during the debate to campaigning efforts over the web, it is undeniable that social media is a powerful resource in political campaigns today. We can see this both in the planned efforts from the candidates’ campaign camps to the phrases and posts that do exactly what social media is supposed to do – go viral and be shared, viewed, retweeted, and liked by the people. Social media and political campaigns are intertwined and you can no longer critically analyze a campaign without taking social media into consideration.

Trent and Friedenberg cover social media and the Internet in Chapter 11. They state that the use of Twitter in a campaign is to create an “authentic personal communication” (375). With 140 characters, candidates can be constantly connected to their constituents and can share information to persuade voters at literally any time of the day. It also allows campaigns to monitor responses, take note of the followers who respond, and gives them the ability to address any specific inquiries. Facebook allows campaigns to share more information than through Twitter, and more importantly allow targeted geographical ads for the campaign. Facebook “is an open megaphone to your community” (372). There is a great source of power in connecting with the American people through social media and campaigns are quickly beginning to capitalize on this.

Both presidential candidates have strong presences on Twitter and Facebook, with both numbering in the hundreds of thousands of likes and followers. President Obama’s campaign also has a strong presence on Tumblr, a microblogging website, and optimizes its posts to have a strong connection with the followers and viewers of the blog and have a number posts with over a thousand likes and shares. Obama knows the power of social media from his 2008 campaign. A Washington Post article discusses the power of social media within an election, and states that Obama “announced his vice president through text message, raised half a billion dollars online” (Weiner) and worked with Facebook co-creator Chris Hughes to create his own social network. The Romney camp has also utilized social media with Facebook, Tumblr, and Mitt Romney’s own iPhone app as well as an app from the RNC.

With the third and final debate airing last night, I wondered if there would be one phrase in particular that would go viral by the end of the night. In the second debate, this occurred with Romney’s remark “binders full of women”. In response to a question prompted by the moderator Candy Crawley about equal pay for women, Romney spoke about his efforts to hire more women when he served as governor of Massachusetts. He reached out to women’s groups, asking from qualified women, and they gave him “binders full of women”. This phrase immediately caught on in all forms of social media. A HuffPost article states that “binders” and “binders full of women” were mentioned on Twitter at one point more than 40,000 times in a minute. This comment also created a Binders Full Of Women Tumblr account that quickly filled with memes and a Facebook page that currently has 356,000 likes. Two parody Twitter accounts were created and quickly generated audiences of 13,000 and 32,000 respectively. The word "binders" increased in it's search on Google by 425% during the first hour of the debate, and it was the #3 query of the night (CBS article).

The third debate did not disappoint: Obama and his “bayonets and horses” remark has gone equally viral. For those in class today, we saw straight from the debate, the new phrase that has taken over the Internet. The hashtag #horsesandbayonets quickly became the number one trending hashtag in the country and third worldwide. At one point in the evening, the phrase was mentioned nearly 60,000 on Twitter. Similarly to Romney’s remark, a Horses and Bayonets Tumblr cropped up and a Facebook page was created and currently has 5,270+ likes. The Obama campaign also capitalized on the moment and bought the search term “bayonets” on Twitter. 

Each candidate also took the viral moments of their opponent to bolster their respective campaigns.  Obama responded to the “binders” comment at a rally the following day, taking the opportunity to talk about the Lily Ledbetter Act and how he will work to have new women graduates get equal pay and Biden called the statement a "1950's time warp" (CNN article). The Obama campaign took the opportunity to talk about equal pay for women and focus on their work with important women's issues. In response to the "horses and bayonets" comment, Ryan bolstered Romney's point in the debate that they find faults in how the Obama administration is handling the US military. Ryan stated on CBS' "This Morning" said that Obama's remark confused him, because the "ocean hasn't shrunk" and decreasing our Navy force would not keep our strength abroad where it is needed (HuffPo article). The speed of virality and the staggering response from the Internet combined with the campaign responses only go to remind us how influential and key social media is to the political process, especially during this current campaign.

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If you are interested, here is an interesting article I came across discussing how the "binders of women" statement affects women voters and the campaigns | CNN article

Presidential Debates: Why are they where they are?

While in class today, someone raised a good point about the location of the Presidential Debates. Why are these Debates held in the specific state, city, and venue that they are held in? This sparked my curiosity and I wondered what the answer to the latter question was as well as other questions. Have there been trends of the location of these debates? And finally, has holding a debate in a specific place had an enormous effect on the election as far as changing local citizen’s opinions on any one candidate?

Since the Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD, has organized every aspect of a presidential debate from the size of podium used to the candidate selection criteria, they are obviously in charge of proposing and selecting the location of the debates. According to an article titled "How Presidential Debates Work: The Ideal Debate" by Josh Clark, selecting a neutral site for a debate can be difficult. Specific rules must be followed in selecting a debate’s location. Debates cannot be held in either candidate’s home state or hometown. Since most of these debates are held at universities (which I have not been able to find a specific reason why – if anyone can find out why please respond to this post!) the debate also cannot be held at either candidate’s alma mater. Debates are usually held in larger cities because the CPD has a minimum requirement of 3,000 available hotel rooms and a $7,500 application fee. There is no verified statement form the CPD that debates are typically held in “swing” or “battleground” but the neutrality of a debate is crucial, and therefore an undecided state would be a much more neutral site for a Presidential Debate.

There is also evidence from past elections that debates have been held in states that proved to be key in the outcome of the presidential election. In 2004, Ohio was known as a battleground state, and the last of the four debates was held in Cleveland, Ohio. According to CNN,the very first televised debate in the 1960 election between Kennedy and Nixon was held in Chicago, Illinois. Kennedy won that first debate and ended up winning Illinois, which proved to be a crucial state in helping Kennedy win over Nixon. (Click here for a full list of debates throughout history and their locations and dates) After looking over this list and counting how many times a certain state has hosted a presidential debate, including this year’s debates, I did find that Missouri has hosted a debate five times. This is two more than the states who have hosted it three times (Florida, Kentucky, and California). I found this trend to be odd considering that Missouri is classically a strong Republican state.

Two of the states (Colorado and Florida) that were locations in this election’s debates, as determined by The New York Times Electoral Map, are labeled at this moment “toss-up states” that could help either candidate win the entire election if they were to get the majority vote in that state. The other two states selected for the presidential debates were New York, a strongly democratic state, and Kentucky, a strongly Republican state. This balance of location partisanship is also evidence to the CPD’s policy of neutrality in the presidential debate sites.

A lot of the information that I found could merely be called coincidental, but I believe that the location of these crucial presidential debates has a lot more of an effect on the presidential election than one might think.

Experimenting with Social Networks & Debates

Not all people enjoy watching debates. I am not someone that finds enjoyment in watching the debates because often they move too fast for me to understand fully what is going on. Watching the last presidential debate lived up to my standards and the stereotypes I had of debates in general. I turned this debate into an experiment for myself, one that was based on Speed versus Accuracy.

There is one thing that helps me understand debates more affectively and that is the activity on social networks during the debates. Whether it is facebook or twitter, social media has been just booming during the debates this year. It is easy to get a feel for what is going on in a debate with the click of a button, checking your social media.

In class we talked about the Incivility in politics and what the contributing factors were. Technology is one of the reasons, due to the problem of speed versus accuracy. When I thought about how much I depend on social networks for my understanding on politics I realize that it is not always the most accurate way to retrieve information. During this debate I was attached to my twitter and facebook to see what others had as reactions to comments made by the candidates.  The action on facebook and twitter during this debate blew prior ratings out of the water as you can read about here .

I did not watch the debate live; I recorded it so I could watch it after I had seen what those who I follow on social networks had to say about this. I went into this debate with a bit of an overview of what was going to go on, it was just time for me to compare the accuracy of the statements I read on the various social networks, versus what I actually saw and heard while watching the debate. I decided to look at the accuracy of my friends, and my assumptions based on their statements, versus what actually happened in the debate. One of the statements that made me anxious to watch the debate was one of the people I follow on twitter posted “Did he just say Obama’s Bin Laden? #debate”. Now, reading this I immediately assumed that this was something that Mitt Romney said during the debate, frankly I figured it was a mistake of his. After I watched the debate I realized that it was the moderator, Bob, who made the mistake when trying to mention Osama Bin Laden. It was the speed of the update on twitter and my friend’s lack of specificity that made my assumption incorrect.

Now the question is, whether or not this has a positive or negative affect on the American people and those who are going to vote. Articles say that due to social media, people do not watch the debates the same way that they used to, as mentioned in the article here.  I believe that this has a negative affect on the debate when people look at social networks before they watch the debate. Based upon who you are looking at on a social network can make you go into the debate with a different mindset. If you are looking at a credible source, such as NBC or CBS news, you have a greater chance of seeing information word, for word as said by the candidates. If you are looking at a friends social network you are more likely to get a one sided opinion or their interpretation of what the candidates have said. You're information will not be validated unless you go to the source itself, the actual debate.